Glob with Numerical Order

Once more, zsh's glob qualifiers come to the rescue.

echo *.pdf(n)

Depending on your environment you can use ls -v with GNU coreutils, e.g.:

gs -q -sPAPERSIZE=a4 -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
   -sOutputFile=out.pdf $(ls -v)

Or if you are on recent versions of FreeBSD or OpenBSD:

gs -q -sPAPERSIZE=a4 -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
   -sOutputFile=out.pdf $(ls | sort -V)

If all the files in question have the same prefix (i.e., the text before the number; c in this case), you can use

gs  …args…  c?.pdf c??.pdf

c?.pdf expands to c0.pdf c1.pdf … c9.pdf.  c??.pdf expands to c10.pdf c11.pdf … c20.pdf (and up to c99.pdf, as applicable).  While each command-line word containing pathname expansion character(s) is expanded to a list of filenames sorted (collated) in accordance with the LC_COLLATE variable, the lists resulting from the expansion of adjacent wildcards (globs) are not merged; they are simply concatenated.  (I seem to recall that the shell man page once stated this explicitly, but I can’t find it now.)

Of course if the files can go up to c999.pdf, you should use c?.pdf c??.pdf c???.pdf.  Admittedly, this can get tedious if you have a lot of digits.  You can abbreviate it a little; for example, for (up to) five digits, you can use c?{,?{,?{,?{,?}}}}.pdf.  If your list of filenames is sparse (e.g., there’s a c0.pdf and a c12345.pdf, but not necessarily every number in between), you should probably set the nullglob option.  Otherwise, if (for example) you have no files with two-digit numbers, you would get a literal c??.pdf argument passed to your program.

If you have multiple prefixes (e.g., a<number>.pdf, b<number>.pdf , and c<number>.pdf , with numbers of one or two digits), you can use the obvious, brute force approach:

a?.pdf a??.pdf b?.pdf b??.pdf c?.pdf c??.pdf

or collapse it to {a,b,c}?{,?}.pdf.