This is a pretty large thing to do if you've never done any programming in UNIX before... Anyway, I'll give you some pointers. Use the man command on any of these:
The default shell in OS X is bash, but if you're used to C you may want to use tcsh instead. It's not really good for scripting, but it has the nifty foreach command. If not, then get a quick Perl introduction from eg.
www.perl.org.
What you need to do is basically to get a list of all the files in question, sort it according to date and start copying them with a new name (generated from a counter) into various folders. Getting filenames is easy, use the "find" command. That command can also execute a command on each of the file it finds, with the "-exec" switch. To get a modification date, use "ls -l" on the path you just got. To grab the relevant field, use "awk" - something like this:
ls -l $filename | awk '{print $6,$7, $8}'
The |, pipe, means that you send the output of one command on to the next. You can also use > to rediret out put to a file. My first idea is to use to find to get a list of the file, use the exec switch to run the above ls -l command and make a file formatted like path/to/file;date.
That done, you can use the "sort" command to sort the list in the right order and the "cut" command (use the -f and -d switches) to remove the date again. Finally use this tempfile as input to a script that uses the "foreach" command (a lot like C for) to rename the files using a counter to generate the name. The folder thing you can hack up with a command that runs whenever the counter is a multiple of 100.
Not trivial, no. It's up to you to see if you can do it. Other interesting commands you may want to use is sed and xargs, they're useful in cases like this.
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