Duplicating and incrementing a filename, and the same for text within

Question

I've done some work in AppleScript; not much in Automator. Am curious which might be the better hammer for this:
Given an existing text file:
ZAM001_001ref.mov (note: from job to job, only the "ZAM" portion will change).
... with a mime type of "video/quicktime", with the contents of:
rtsptext rtsp://server.blah.woof/ondemand/zamzam/ZAM_001/mov/ZAM_001001.mov
... I want to create x copies (x depends on the job), incrementing the file name to ZAM001_002ref.mov, etc., and likewise increment the text 001.mov to 002.mov in the file itself (shortened here for brevity).
If the program were speaking, it would say:
Give me the location of the first file.
Tell me how many incremented files you want. Pseudo code maybe something like:
Repeat x times
Duplicate a file in the Finder, incrementing a number in a file name by 1.
Increment a number in the rtsp server/path/file name by 1.
Save the file.
End repeat

Answer 1

This would be tricky (or at the least convoluted) to do in Automator, especially if you wanted to keep to the default actions. Leopard's Automator does have variables, but there are no standard function to do something like increment a number. There are actions to make new text files and to get text from files (and a few to work with an open TextEdit document), but again, no standard functions are available to do something like modify an existing text file. A few Run AppleScript actions would be able to do these things, but you might as well do the whole thing in AppleScript - unless you were wanting to use Automator for something you haven't disclosed.