Passing file location to script in Terminal

Question

Here's what I've figured out so far:
tell application "Terminal"
set Tiedosto to the selection
do script "/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC -vvv " & Tiedosto & " --sub-track=1 --sout=\"#transcode{vcodec=mp2v,vb=1024,acodec=mpga,ab=128,soverlay}:standard{d st=/Users/Antti/Desktop/video.mpg,access=file}\""
end tell
The idea is that I could select a file from Finder, activate the script and the path of the selected file would be passed to the Terminal script as "Tiedosto".
Well, nothing happens... Any suggestions?
iMac Intel 2GHz   Mac OS X (10.4.7)  

Answer 1

Your first problem is that you're getting the selection in Terminal.app, not the Finder, so you need to ask the Finder for the selection.
Then, the Finder will return a list of selected items. You'll need to extract items from this list before you can use them. You can either iterate through the items, or take the first item, depending on whether you want to support multiple items:
<pre class=command>tell application "Finder"
set selectedItems to (get selection as alias list)
repeat with eachItem in selectedItems
set currentFilePath to quoted form of POSIX path of eachItem
-- now you can use 'currentFilePath' in your do shell script command
end repeat
end tell</pre>
The other option is to save the script as a droplet so that you can drag and drop files on the script icon. This is a more Mac-like experience and can easily be done by adding an 'on open (droppedFiles)' handler and iterating through the droppedFiles.
Note that when doing this kind of thing you should add additional checks to validate the item is of the correct type you expect (e.g. you don't want to process a selected folder, MS Word document, JPEG image, etc., etc.).