If you don't like all the #*# and *~ files floating around in your working directory, put the following elisp code in your .emacs file.

;; Put autosave files (ie #foo#) and backup files (ie foo~) in ~/.emacs-backups/.
(custom-set-variables
  '(auto-save-file-name-transforms '((".*" "~/.emacs-backups/autosaves/\\1" t)))
  '(backup-directory-alist '((".*" . "~/.emacs-backups/backups/"))))

;; create the autosave dir if necessary, since emacs won't.
(make-directory "~/.emacs-backups/autosaves/" t)

Reference: http://snarfed.org/gnu_emacs_backup_files

Automator and Scripting Approach

The Automator Actions you want are:

• Ask for Finder Items, with Type set to Folders.
• Run Shell Script, with Shell set to /usr/bin/perl.
• New Text File

For the shell script, copy and paste in:

use strict;
use warnings;
use File::Basename;
use File::Find;

find(sub {
    return if (-d $File::Find::name);
    my($filename,undef,undef) = fileparse($_,qr/\.[^.]*/);
    print $filename."\n";
}, shift);

You can use the New TextEdit Document action if you want the resulting file list to appear in TextEdit but not saved to disk.

To learn more about using Automator, see Apple's Mac Basics: Automator.