Automator – Fixing Node Command Errors in AppleScript

Scripts run via Automator use the default search path which usually does not include /usr/local/bin. In your case an easy fix would be to put

export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH

somewhere at the beginning of the script.

The reason your shell script isn't doing what you want is because Automator passes the full path of the files as arguments.

If the full path to one of the files is /Users/foo/Temp/file1.txt, then your script attempts to rename it to ers/foo/Temp/file1.txt, which isn't what you want.

Try this instead:

for f in "$@"; do
  FILENAME=$(basename "$f")
  DIRNAME=$(dirname "$f")
  mv "$f" "${DIRNAME}/${FILENAME:3}"
done

Better still (handles relative filenames correctly):

for f in "$@"; do
  FILENAME=$(basename "$f")
  DIRNAME=$(dirname "$f")
  if [ -z "$DIRNAME" ]; then
    DIRNAME="."
  fi
  mv "$f" "${DIRNAME}/${FILENAME:3}"
done