Is this possible in AppleScript?

Question

I'm working on a project that will require a new file to be uploaded to a directory on a server every day. I've written a nice little script that launches YummyFTP and overwrites the designated folder on the server with the contents of a nominated folder called "Upload" on my desktop containing 2 files (one.mov and one.txt). So far so good and it works fine.
Because I then have to change the contents of the folder daily, I have a "Pending" folder with 365 files that are named with a descriptive title eg. holiday.mov/holiday.txt, golf.mov/golf.txt etc.) The path is yada..yada../desktop/Upload/Pending
Is there a way to write a script that will automatically take the top 2 items from the "Pending" folder, rename them and move them to the nominated folder? Or maybe overwrite them based on the creation date. I figure that if they are identically named, they will always be adjacent.
Any help or tips appreciated.

Answer 1

There's actually no imperative whatsoever to pre-determine the order. In fact, it might be a bit more fun if no-one knows what today's .mov will be
Oh, then that's easy. Pick a file at random
Here's a starting script - define the source and destination directories at the top of the script. It then picks a file at random, strips off that file's extension and locates all other files in the directory that match that base name (e.g. if it finds 'snowboarding.txt' as the random file, it then strips '.txt' and finds all 'snowboarding*' files.
It then duplicates those files to the destination directory. I know your original post calls for it to rename the files, but I'm not sure what you want/expect to happen there. I'm sure its do-able, just need to know what you want.
set sourceDir to "HD:path:to:sourcefiles" -- path to source files
set destDir to "HD:path:to:uploadsdir" -- path to watched uploads folder
tell application "Finder"
  set theFile to (some file of folder sourceDir)
  set basename to my stripExtn(theFile)
  set files2Copy to every file of sourceDir whose name begins with basename
  duplicate files2Copy to folder destDir
end tell
on stripExtn(filename)
  set {n, e} to {name, name extension} of filename
  set b to characters 1 through -(2 + (length of e)) of n as text
  return b
end stripExtn