Indexing in nonsequential order

The following code copy files from the source folder to a destination folder:

SourcePath ='/f1/f2/f3/f4/f5/f6/f7/f8/';    
index = [00001]
%iteration for the 9th subfolder
for i = 1 : length(index)
    newParticipant=num2str(index(i)); 
    T = ['sub-m',newParticipant];
    SourceFolder = fullfile([SourcePath,T],'f10/f11')
    
    %Destination folder is the current directory + DistFolder
    DistFolder  = fullfile('d1',T,'d3'); 
    [X,Y,Z] = copyfile(fullfile(SourceFolder,'*y_file.chik.chik'), ...
        DistFolder);
end

Question: How can I automate the index when the subbfolder's name (see above 9th subfolder) are 5-digits non sequential numbers?. The codeline

index = 00001 : 02500; 

yileds an undesired output: It will create multiple empty folders in "distfolder".

For instance, the first file to copy is located in

SourceFolder = '/f1/f2/f3/f4/f5/f6/f7/f8/sub-m00001/f10/f11'

The Line index = 00001 : 02500; will create 120 empty files, since the second file to copy is located in

SourceFolder = '/f1/f2/f3/f4/f5/f6/f7/f8/sub-m00121/f10/f11'

[Stephen23]

Why not simply use DIR() ?

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/import_export/process-a-sequence-of-files.html

Perhaps something like this:

S = dir('/f1/f2/f3/f4/f5/f6/f7/f8/sub-m*/f10/f11/*')

[Star Strider]

My point exactly!

Answer 1

[Rik]

Your code is so confusing that I don't know what edit to suggest, but I expect you need to use the exist function to check whether a file exists before you create a new folder.

Answer 2

[Star Strider]

I do not completely understand your problem, however one solution could be to use the dir function to retrieve all the files in the original directory, and then extract the numbers from that list into a vector. There are several ways to do that (some obvious and others less so), depending on the original file names.