Iterate groups of files in for loop

Question

I have a set of files like this:

A1.xlsx
A2.xlsx
B1.xlsx
C1.xlsx
C2.xlsx

I only know the prefixes (A, B, C) but the rest of the name is unknown beforehand, and so is the number of files. I need to call some commands passing them groups of those files like this:

mycommand A*.xlsx
mv A*.xlsx tmp/
mycommand B*.xlsx
mv B*.xlsx tmp/
mycommand C*.xlsx
mv C*.xlsx tmp/

I've tried different syntaxes for the loop like for fileGroup in A* B* C* but I've only managed to pass the filenames one by one to mycommand, or instead to call mycommand only once with all the files. Is there a syntax in bash to perform this?

Answer 1

Assuming you know and can hard-code the prefixes:

for p in A B C D; do
    mycommand "$p"*.xlsx
    mv "$p"*.xlsx tmp/
    ...
done

Answer 2

Use a glob expression for all of them. For files starting with A or B or C.

<mycommand> [ABC]*.xlsx
mv -t tmp/ -- [ABC]*.xlsx

Here is a good read about the glob.

---

In case you need to execute commands that do not accept many file arguments, you would have to invoke separated processes for each argument, but still you can select them using the same glob:

for f in [ABC]*.xlsx; do
    <some_command> "$f"
done