Can I get information about the object names from an input file and use it for naming objects in the output file? I want to setup a pipeline where I can iterate a bunch of files containing a bunch of objects.

You can completely automate this sort of stuff with Python in Houdini. This script doesn't do what you want, but it may give you some clues as to how to attack the problem, as it demonstrates how to open a file and read the lines out: https://gist.github.com/howiemnet/8784cf04568c849271730965eaf35159 [gist.github.com]

Thanks howiem! I will dive in to it :-)