Macos – Automator – Set Selected Folder Path as Variable

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I'm trying to setup an Automator service that would download a list of URLs to the currently selected folder, or wherever the service was ran from. The only problem is I don't see how I would go about setting the currently selected folder as a path to download the files to. I'm thinking of something like this:

Screenshot of my Automator idea

Note: Just realized I had service receives selected as "TEXT in ANY APPLICATION" in my screenshot. This will be "FOLDERS in FINDER" when I hopefully get this figured out!

Where currentFolder currently selected folder, or wherever the service was ran from. As far as I can tell, I would just need to somehow set the currently selected folder as a variable like currentFolder, then set the Download URLs location to that variable? Let me know if I need to explain anything further!

Best Answer

So I took a slightly different route, and just setup a shell script. Apparently cd "$@"; will get the current directory. View a picture of my new automator service workflow.

Basically, I created a new service in Automator, then set Service Receives Selected to "files or folders" in "Finder", and added a "Run Shell Script" to the workflow. I set Shell to "/bin/bash", and Pass Input to "as arguments", then placed the following in the script editor.

cd "$@";
curl -O http://www.example.com/file1.zip
curl -O http://www.example.com/file2.zip
curl -O http://www.example.com/file3.zip
unzip \*.zip
rm *.zip

Now I can right click on any folder, and download my list of files.

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Macos – How to change the appearance of empty folders in finder using Automator

I tried a few cases, and seems it works as you need:

Shell script, usr/bin/perl, pass input as arguments.

automator service

use File::Find;

find({ wanted => \&find_files, no_chdir => 1 }, @ARGV);

sub find_files
{
    if (-f $_)
    {
        ($file) = $_ =~ /.*\/(.*)$/;
        push (@all_files, $_) if ($file ne ".DS_Store");
    }
    else
    {
        push (@all_folders, $_);
    }
}

sub osascript($) { system 'osascript', map { ('-e', $_) } split(/\r/, $_[0]); } 

foreach(@all_files)
{
    @paths = split(/\//, $_);
    for $i (0..$#paths-1)
    {
        if ($i == 0)
        {
            $x = "$paths[$i]";
        }
        else
        {
            $x = "$last[$i-1]/$paths[$i]";
        }
        push(@last, $x);
        $temp{$x} ++;
    }
    @last = ();
 }

@not_gray_folders = keys %temp;
foreach(@all_folders)
{
    $folder = $_; $flag = 0;
    foreach(@not_gray_folders)
    {
        if ($folder eq $_)
        {
            $flag = 1;
        }
    }
    if (!$flag)
    {
        $label = 7;
    }
    else
    {
        $label = 0;
    }
    &osascript ("tell application \"Finder\" to set label index of alias POSIX file \"$folder\" to $label");
}

Best Answer

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Macos – How to change the appearance of empty folders in finder using Automator

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