I'm attempting to use the adb pull command to copy only certain files (jpg) to my macbook. I tried "adb pull sdcard/mydir/*.jpg" but it apparently doesn't interpret wildcards. How can I get only the jpg files copied over? I have rooted the phone if that helps.

Pull multiple files using regex:

Create pullFiles.sh:

#!/bin/bash
HOST_DIR=<pull-to>
DEVICE_DIR=/sdcard/<pull-from>
EXTENSION=".jpg"

for file in $(adb shell ls $DEVICE_DIR | grep $EXTENSION'$')
do
    file=$(echo -e $file | tr -d "\r\n"); # EOL fix
    adb pull $DEVICE_DIR/$file $HOST_DIR/$file;
done

Run it:

Make it executable: chmod +x pullFiles.sh

Run it: ./pullFiles.sh

Notes:

• as is, won't work when filenames have spaces
• includes a fix for end-of-line (EOL) on Android, which is a "\r\n"

As to the short script, the following runs on my Linux host

#!/bin/bash
HOST_DIR=<pull-to>
DEVICE_DIR=/sdcard/<pull-from>
EXTENSION="\.jpg"

while read MYFILE ; do
    adb pull "$DEVICE_DIR/$MYFILE" "$HOST_DIR/$MYFILE"
done < $(adb shell ls -1 "$DEVICE_DIR" | grep "$EXTENSION")

"ls minus one" lets "ls" show one file per line, and the quotation marks allow spaces in the filename.