The Automator variables are only used in the Automator workflow. The variable themselves are not directly accessible to either a shell script or a Python script. The Run Shell Script
action allows you to pass the values of particular variables to a shell script in either of two ways: either piping them in through stdin
or by passing them as execution arguments. For this sort of use case, the latter is easier. To start with, you need to pick Automator variable names in the Set Value of Variable
and Get Value of Variable
actions so the values selected can be retained between actions. Here's a very rudimentary workflow example where I've selected two folders: