Way to read the Spotlight comment in Automator workflow

automator

I need to do some clean up on Spotlight comments. Is there a way to read the Spotlight comment, then set it to another value ? For example let's say I need to remove one specific word in the comments. Adding is easy, with Set Spotlight Comments for Finder Items. I'm looking for the opposite action.

Best Answer

Since it appears that Automator doesn't have a "Get Spotlight Comment" action (surprisingly), maybe you can do this with AppleScript. (See this forum)

Something like:

tell application "Finder"   
    set thisItem to "Macintosh SSD:untitled folder"
    set Comm to comment of folder thisItem (* get comment *)
end tell
return Comm (* to return the Comment string for editing *)

This returns the Comment (in the Get Info Window) of the specified folder on my Desktop, and could be modified to modify the comment of all items passed in by Automator.

In Automator, you'd have to add the action "Run Applescript" and insert a script like this there. Unfortunately I don't think you can have the script take both the files & new comment as input from the previous Automator action. So you'd probably have to hard-code the comment modification part, and add a set comment part, perhaps like so:

on run {input, parameters}

    tell application "Finder"   
        set thisItem to the input as string 
        set Comm to comment of folder thisItem (* get comment *)
        (* manipulate the comment strings*)
        set comment of folder thisItem to "NewCommentString" (* set comment *)  
    end tell
    return input (* to pass the file list to next automator action)

end run

This script currently only modifies a single file's comment - I believe you'd have to loop through the file list to do it on many files. (To make the new comment modifiable at run-time, maybe use "Show this action when run" on the *Run AppleScript" action?). Or you might end up moving the entire script to AppleScript.

Automator Email Notifications for Matching Text on a Site

Add a Get Specified URLs action. Add to it the address of the page you want to check.
Add a Get Text from Webpage action and make sure the dropdown is set to plain text.
Add a Run Shell Script action, with the shell set to /bin/bash and the input setting to to stdin. Enter the following text, replacing search term with the text you want to match (be sure to keep the quotes if the string has spaces):
```
grep -o "search term" | wc -l | tr -d " "
```
Note that the search is case sensitive.

Add a Run AppleScript action, and insert the following text, replacing me@example.com as appropriate:

on run {input, parameters}
    if input > 0 then
        tell application "Mail"
            set theNewMessage to make new outgoing message with properties {subject:"Found Matches", content:"Found " & input & " matches", visible:false}
            tell theNewMessage
                make new to recipient at end of to recipients with properties {address:"me@example.com"}
                send
            end tell
        end tell
    end if
end run

You can replace the subject and content, but be sure to properly format them as AppleScript strings (I'll leave this as an exercise to the reader, it's fairly easy to figure out, Google if necessary).

That will send an email if there are any matches for the string on the site. The AppleScript is used instead of Automator's email actions because Automator doesn't offer any conditional (i.e. if statements) means of performing actions, and we only want to send an email if a match was found. Let me know in the comments if you have any questions.

Why is Automator not working with Spotlight Search

What happens if you try in terminal.app (change /Search/Directory/ to yours):

mdfind -onlyin /Search/Directory/ kMDItemFSName == "\"NUCLEUS SOUNDLAB Pantheon III.rfl\""

Or in applescript editor.

    set searchPath to "/Search/Directory/"

    set this_item to "/Users/USERNAME/Desktop/NUCLEUS SOUNDLAB Pantheon III.rfl"

    set theFileName to "\\\"" & (do shell script "basename " & quoted form of (POSIX path of (this_item))) & "\\\"" as string

--set theFileName to quoted form of (do shell script "basename " & quoted form of (POSIX path of (this_item))) as string

  set theOrigFilePath to paragraphs of (do shell script "mdfind -onlyin " & searchPath & " kMDItemFSName == \"" & theFileName & "\"")

Best Answer

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