/Automator

Creating useful automator scripts for automating workflows and providing quick tranformation of text files

Automator

Creating useful automator scripts for automating workflows and providing quick tranformation of text files

Create aumomator workflow

This example creates an aumomator workflow that sort lines in the selected text alphabetically and remove doublicates

Steps

  1. Open Automator on your Mac.
  2. Click on "New Document".
  3. Select "Quick Action" and click "Choose".
  4. In the new window, set "Workflow receives current" to "text".
  5. In the new window, tick the box "Output replaces selected text".
  6. In the search bar at the top, search for "Run Shell Script" and drag it into the workflow area on the right.
  7. In the "Run Shell Script" action, set "Pass input" to "to stdin".
  8. In the script area, enter the following script: sort -u
  9. Save the workflow as "Sort and Unique".

Use aumomator workflow

Steps

  1. Open any application with selectable text, such as TextEdit or Safari.
  2. Select some text.
  3. Right-click on the selected text, hover over "Services", and select "Sort and Unique" (or whatever you named the workflow).

The selected text will now be replaced with the sorted and unique output (or whatever your workflow does).

Useful services

Sort and Unique

Run Shell Script, set shell to Bash and insert the following content:

sort -u

Prettify JSON

Run Shell Script, set shell to Python3 and insert the following content:

import sys, json
print(json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), indent=4))

Compress video

Workflow received current: movie files IN Finder.app Input is: entire selection Image: Action Colour: blue

Get Selected Finder Items Run Shell Script, set shell to Bash, Pass input: as arguments and insert the following content:

for f in "$@"; do
	/usr/local/bin/ffmpeg -i "$f" -vcodec libx264 -crf 27 "$f"_crf27.mp4
done