I've tried all variations here. I get the error "tcsh: illegal variable name" with all of them. Any ideas?

I had to change the shell to /bin/sh to get it to work. This is in the drop-down menu in the second action of the Workflow in Automator.

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Kevin Horton

It should have been /bin/bash as the shell (which is what I made it when I created the workflow).
Automator must revert it to the user's default shell or something, which is just plain absurd! Thanks for bringing this up, and I'll going to figure out exactly what's going on here.

But yes, the immediate solution is to simply double click the "tgz.workflow" file, and pick /bin/bash or /bin/sh from the drop-down in box #2 of the workflow.

Does it work like shell scripts? Would adding

#!/bin/bash

to the first line solve the problem?

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Everyone loves a clown, but no one will lend him money!

Yes, adding

#!/bin/sh

solves the problem.