Please disregard and see DT3 check PDF/A scan - #22 by chrillek for an explanation
My oh my, this error message is so beautiful in its uselessness. Worth of printing, framing and putting on the wall of every Automator fan.
Now that that’s off my chest: one solution might be to stuff all commands in a file, make it executable and pass that to Automator for execution (assuming it knows how to do that).
Alternative: replace the newlines in the command with semicolons.
Alternative: enclose if part in single quotes.
But I really don’t know what Automator can and cannot do. I’ve never used it, apparently for good reason.