automator perpetually running on second action

well, I'll need to move over to my Lion partition to check, but this works fine on 10.6.8. it seems the problem is with the Filter Finder Items action (the first action completes properly) so it might be that the Filter action is broken under Lion.

However, I'll point out that there's a bug in your workflow. You really want to add a Get Folder Contents action after the first action; the filter action will only filter the items passed to it, it won't recurse into folders, so you're actually asking the workflow to look for Finder objects in the one-item list {~/Desktop} that have the jpg extension. the folder Desktop doesn't have an extension, and that might be confusing that action.

I'm not sure why permissions would keep the action from completing, but if it works...

That article is a bit goofy though - Access Control Lists are used in addition to the normal POSIX permissions to provide a finer or more customized access, but they are still permissions. There aren't any system-level vs user-level access rights - a singe permissions system determines who can access what across the entire file system, and ACLs can be used anywhere. Normally the only ACLs used in a user account are on the system created folders (to prevent "accidental" removal) and the Public/Drop Box folder (to give additional access to the dropped items), although Lion reverted the ability to propagate ACLs by using Get Info's "apply to enclosed items".

That error looks like there is an application in the input list - the Get Folder Contents action will go into application bundles, which can have many, many files and folders. The error may also indicate a Spotlight issue since the Filter Finder Items action does use Spotlight to do its thing - for example, the database may be corrupt or incomplete, or the input items are from a disk or folder that is in Spotlight's privacy list.

Did you ever figure out what was happening here? I just upgraded to Lion and now I can't step through any workflow even *very* simple 2-step ones I create from scratch. I followed the instructions to reset ACLs but that had no effect on the automator issue. Below is an an example *very* simple workflow that I can't step through. Step hangs on the first action and the Step icon gets grayed out. Stepping through workflows worked fine for me yesterday when I was running Snow Leopard.

So, I have officially given up trying to get the Automator Step functionality to work in Lion. I have tried everything to remove any old configuration data in caches and other files that Automator reads in order to work around this problem (thinking it might be some weird configuration corruption that occured due to the upgrade from Snow Leopard to Lion). Still the Step funtionality failed. Then, I tried running very simple 2-step Automator workflows on 3 other machines running Lion (with completely different user environments than mine) and the Step function failed to work on all of those machines as well. So, this has got to be a bug. As a somewhat clumsy workaround I have added an Automator "Ask for Confirmation" action to my workflows after each step or set of steps which I am testing. Then, when I'm sure everything is working right, I disable all the "Ask for Confirmation" actions to create the final working version of the workflow.

Good news. I just upgraded to Mountain Lion and now the Automator Step functionality works again so the bug has been fixed! It sure does make it easier to debug Automator scripts because the "Ask for Confirmation" workaround I was using was really a pain.

I am running 10.9.2 and the Automator Step functionality does not work. The Step button stays inactivated and Workflow runs without stepping.

You should ask your question in a new topic instead of tacking onto someone else's, especially since this topic was started over two years (and two OS versions) ago.