Mac OS X Leopard - ARCAism

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CHAPTER 23 MAC OS X AUTOMATION WITH AUTOMATOR AND APPLESCRIPT
Using Actions
Let’s use our keyword to do a Google image search. There are lots of actions for working with
web data, but there’s no action to turn our keyword into a URL. However, there is a Run Shell
Script action, and you can easily create a URL string in a shell script.
To add an action to your workflow, drag it from the sidebar’s right column. When it is over
the workflow area, the action will expand into a full panel. To rearrange actions within the
workflow, simply drag them around.
From the Utilities group, drag the Run Shell Script action to the workflow. The Ask for Text
action automatically connects to the Run Shell Script action. When a workflow runs, it executes
each action sequentially, from top to bottom. If an action generates output, it’s assumed to be the
next action’s input. This relationship is represented by the connection between the two actions.
If two actions do not connect, no data will flow between them. If you want an action to
ignore the data coming from the action above it, select Ignore Input from the receiving action’s
context menu.
Select “/bin/bash” from the Shell drop-down and “as arguments” from the “Pass input”
drop-down. Enter the following simple shell script in the text area:
echo "http://images.google.com/images?q="$1
This simple script will return the beginning of a Google image query URL (as determined
experimentally in Safari), plus the first argument, which will be the output of the Ask for Text
action: the user’s keyword input. Running the workflow will produce the completed URL, as
shown in Figure 23-6.
Figure 23-6. Running a shell script in Automator
NOTE Shell scripting is covered in Chapter 19. Apple also provides a shell scripting primer,
available online: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/OpenSource/Conceptual/
ShellScripting/.
Once we have the URL to the search, we’ll want to get the results. A Google image search
will return a page of links. To extract the links from the page, drag the Get Link URLs from
Webpages action from the Internet group. You might as well check the “Only return URLs in the
same domain as the starting page” option.