Pages and Terminal output different results of word count

Ok, so changed the output to Variable Path (set itself to Desktop instantly). Still getting that error (I even changed the action to custom its name to more Unix-friendly - to no avails). My version of Automator is 2.2.4, what's yours? I feel mine's buggy as ****. I checked - no extra code hiding.

How do I run that code from within Terminal - just to check how it would work?

Thank you for your patience trying to help, but I let it go. The action still fails. I still get either "file doesn't exist" or "user interaction not allowed" messages.

Moreover I even couldn't execute these shell lines in Terminal. It will display the same message "file doesn't exist" or produce output that is a mess (in the latter case I omitted -stdout flag) of creepy symbols. I then figured out the problems with the filename and corrected (it contained ./, it was incorrect, so I deleted these), re-added -stdout, but it went nowhere while on conversion displaying rtf text handling data with the converted file's location undetectable.

What a headache!!

I'm not familiar with the shell scripting syntax that much. I don't know, for ex, what the combination $f is for and what I have to change or what IT changes or stores. However, simple logic tells me that since the result of Extract text from PDF is to be passed to that Shell Script all it has to do is to count words and pop a window and to accomplish that the input should be the text (not necessarily rtf, it can be txt as well).

I also would like to be able just drag-n-drop pdf file on top of my-made App's icon to trigger the workflow.

Hi again, VikingOSX. Return here just to report on some progress I made during the last few days of investigating the situation with these errors. Your code had errors in the osascript part. Here's how it should've look

for f in "$@"
do
words=$(textutil -stdout -convert txt  | wc -w | awk '$1=$1')
osascript -e 'tell application "Finder"' -e 'activate' -e 'display dialog "Word Count: $words" as text
end tell'
done

I now get that Finder window popping up but with "Word Count: $words" line instead of "Word count: [number]".

VikingOSX wrote:

The following lines in the Run Shell Script that is set to pass input: as arguments will produce a dialog with a word count value in it. There is no need to use the Finder tell block.

for f in "$@"

do

words=$(textutil -stdout -convert txt "${f}" | wc -w | awk '$1=$1')

osascript -e "display dialog \"Word Count: $words\" as text & return & current date"

done

And yet these lines produce constant error messages. The corresponding log entries (at the bottom of Automator worksheet) will produce sort of "no user interaction allowed", wrong syntax (like "expected expression but found end of line, expected end of line but found identifier/expresion/parameter etc") warnings. I dig up on the issue and here's what I found:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13484482/no-user-interaction-allowed-when-run ning-applescript-in-python

The quote:

from the command line notice this won't work...

osascript -e 'display dialog "Now it will not work."'

But this will work since we tell the Finder to do it...

osascript -e 'tell application "Finder"'-e 'activate'-e 'display dialog "Now it works!"'-e 'end tell'

It was not unless I omitted "\" symbol and added tell blocks when it stopped spitting out that error messages and finally diplayed that dialog albeit containing not what it was meant to. Else I can't in the world discover what interrupts it.

for f in "$@" is also present there, just outside the capture

Yes, I'm on Lion

Shell script seems to be too hard for me as of now. I managed to solve the problem by adding "Run AppleScript" action and executing shell script from there.

I passed a very simple script containing a variable:

set WordCount to do shell script "wc -w /Users/myusername/Desktop/*.txt"

tell application "Finder"

display dialog WordCount

end tell

That's it, no torture anymore trying to painstakingly figure out all the subtleties of a very capricious shell (though I'm learning UNIX and still would like to be able to master shell-scripting one day to the level when I could utilize the full power of OS X which I need for my daily work).

P.S. BTW, why "Run Apple Script" has that strange layout "on run, parameters blah-blah-blah (*your text goes here*) end run"? It's utter non-sense: when I inserted my script the first time it went nowhere, so I just deleted all that junk and typed it in like I would do that in AppleScript Editor - and succeeded!