Move a range of numbered files?

I've got 291 numbered files (starting at 001 - title and ending at 291 - title) that need moved into separate directories. (001 to 021 to folder 1, 022 to 053 to folder 2, they aren't necessarily the same number of files each time).

I figured I could do it in a yucky way like this: ls | head -n 21 | sed -r 's|(.*)|mv \1 /path/to/folder1|' | sh

I'm almost positive there's a better way, so what would it be?

EDIT: So that would've worked fine, but I remembered...

I'm not stuck using a terminal, so I used a file manager to click and drag. Question still stands though.

Since you said it's not always exactly 21 files than you need to move the files manually, and to do that effectively you could use brace expansion:

mv filename{001..21} dir1
mv filename{022..53} dir2
...

This will move the files as you described (except that the second range would be 022 to 042 for the second 21 files).

for ((i = 1; i <= 291; i++))
do
    ((d = (i - 1) / 21 + 1))
    printf -v file 'filename%03d' "$i"
    printf -v dir  'dirname%02d'  "$d"
    [[ -d "$d" ]] && mkdir "$d"
    mv "$f" "$d"
done

What I mean is to move a lot of files(like ten thousands or a million), shell will complain about the file list too long if you just use {1..20}, so

In zsh, you can load the mv builtin:

setopt extended_glob zmodload

zsh/files

after doing that, you can use command like:

mv ./somefolder/{1..100000}.txt  pathto/yourfolder/

or if you are writing some shell scripts, you can do something like this:

for i in `seq $start $end`;  
    do  mv "prefix${i}suffix.txt" pathto/yourfolder/  
done

if you are not using zsh, you may refer to https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/128559/solving-mv-argument-list-too-long