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AUTOMATOR MAC USE VARIABLES INSIDE GET SPECIFIED TEXT SERIES
Workflow: A workflow is a series of actions that runs inside of Automator.All of these are basically different types of workflows they’re just triggered in different ways: You’ll see a variety of different document types you can start with. You could also find it under Other > Automator in Launchpad or Applications > Automator in the Finder. Now you can go back to Automator and paste wherever wherever you want your variable to appear, even if you can't normally insert the variable into that field.Launching Automator and Creating a DocumentĪutomator is installed on your Mac by default, so you can launch it by pressing Command+Space to open Spotlight search, typing Automator, and pressing Enter. Copy this string, with the $() surrounding it.
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Search the file for this UUID string and you will see that whenever Automator wants to insert the variable, it will enter $(BD464B7A-ACDE-4A63-B595-FAF1DA6DE26E). That long string of letters and numbers is how Automator refers to your variable. The UUID will have a line that is something like this: Each variable has several lines to define it.
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The first instance of it should be in a section that starts with variables. This is the XML file, so open it with TextEdit or something. Within this folder, go to Contents and find the document.wflow file. Save the workflow and then, in Finder, right click the Automator file and select Show Package Contents from the pop-up menu. Give the variable some distinct name like myVariable. To do this, create the Automator workflow and save it. It helps to know that that the Automator is just creating an XML file and you can edit this directly. I searched the internet and saw some workarounds where people created shell scripts to rename the files. So I could not create a workflow that prompted the user for the filename, then use their answer to rename the files. Most annoyingly, in the Rename Finder Items action I could not use the variable to create the new file name (in my case I was using a sequential name). For example, in the Ask for Confirmation action, I could put the variable into the title, but not the message.
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I used Automator in 10.5 for the first time and got quickly frustrated by the fact that you could not insert variables in many place.