Does Automator Support Wildcards?

Automator (or AppleScript) do not use wildcards like several of the shells do, so you might try the *Run Shell Script* action if you are familiar with that kind of thing.

When you rename the file, do you want to leave the characters as-is and rename around them, or just delete those characters? Are the characters you want to ignore always in the same location? I have an Automator action that can rename (or delete) a substring or index range, if that will work for what you are wanting to do.

Hmmm - hadn't thought of keeping a substring for some reason. I've been repackaging my Automator actions and updating for Snow Leopard compatibility though, so thanks for the idea. Using the action with your example, the setting would be to keep the substring from (characters) 6 through 8 - you can download my *Change Name of Finder Items* action here.

I know this thread's been dead for nine months, but I just wanted to say thanks. Just today I ran into a situation where I wanted to delete the first seven or eight characters in a series of 634 files. Your script made it beautifully easy. The output from my previous Automator action was a series of PDFs that all had "job XXX-" appended in front of the previous file name. A simple delete starting at the beginning and going until "-" did the charm in about twenty seconds.

Great job!

Thanks for the feedback.

Just another: THANKS ! really helpful.

Thanks man you just corrected one of the worst problems Automator had, and saved me a lot of time!

Red_Menace. I am trying to do something with Automator and thought you might be able to help. I have a list of filenames: "A-B.mp3" for instance where "A" is everything before the dash and "B" is everything after the dash. How do I create a workflow that would automatically re-order the file name to "B-A.mp3"? Without wildcards, this seems impossible to me.

Not sure if this would come under wildcards, but a *Run AppleScript* action can be used to swap parts of text around. Are there multiple divider characters, or are you just looking for the first one?

You should post your specific questions to a new topic so that it doesn't get lost in an existing one - I almost missed your question here since this topic is answered. Tiger's Automator is also a bit different than the Leopard ones, if your profile is correct.

I'm trying to delete a string of text ("Movie - ## - ") where ## is a series of numbers from 01 through 44 in a filename. How would I do this since Automator doesn't use wildcards?

Thanks,
Scott