First crack at an automator, I have a few questions

Scripting Forums Automator
#1

I have a task I’m trying to automate. I was originally thinking of doing it with Applescript but now I’m hoping to tackle some of it with Automator.

Here’s what I want to do:
Search for files of a specific name
Extract a certain line from the file(it’s a text file and the line will always be the same)
Combine all the extracted data into a new text file and also do some sorting.

I can probably tackle the last step in applescript once I get all the data into one file. I hopped into automator and started making what I though I needed. I’m not really getting it to do anything and I am stumped.

This is what I thought might work:
Find Finder Items
Get Specified Finder Items
Combine Text FIles
New TextEdit Document
Set Contents of TextEdit Document

The automator never seems to find any files, nor does it ever put any text into a new file even if I actually feed it a text file at the beginning. Can anyone point out what I’m missing or some examples of this type of thing? Thanks.

#2

That action is only for specifying items by name; You can remove it if you’re using another action to search for them.

#3

Kick this around… Create a text variable I’ll call it “Text” and then…

Ask for Text

Set Value of Variable
Variable: “Text”

Spotlight
Search for: “Text”

Filter Finder Items
Kind is Text

(optional)
Choose from List