Not sure if this helps you John, but I have an old (Bigfix 8.1 level) pdf document that explains ‘not active of action’ that I can’t find on developer.bigfix.com.
Cut & Paste from the document (apologies, the formatting may be a little awry):
For instance, an Action may create and access a file that doesn’t yet exist in the prefetch phase:
wait chkntfs c: > c:\output.txt
if {line 2 of file "c:\output.txt" as lowercase contains "not dirty"}
regset "HKLM\Software\MyCompany\" "Last NTFS Check"="OK"
else
regset "HKLM\Software\MyCompany\" "Last NTFS Check"="FAIL"
endif
In this Windows example, the output file doesn’t exist until the script is actually executed. The prefetch parser will notice that the file doesn’t exist when it checks for its contents. It will then throw an error and terminate the Action. However, you can adjust the if-condition to allow the prefetch pass to succeed. One technique is to use the “not active of action” expression which always returns TRUE during the prefetch pass. You can use this to avoid the problematic block during the pre-parse:
wait chkntfs c: > c:\output.txt
if {not active of action OR (line 2 of file "c:\output.txt" as lowercase contains "not dirty")}
regset "HKLM\Software\MyCompany\" "Last NTFS Check"="OK"
else
regset "HKLM\Software\MyCompany\" "Last NTFS Check"="FAIL"
endif
By checking first to see whether the Action is being pre-parsed or executed, you get a successful prefetch pass and the desired behavior when the action is running.
Correction:
I have found this documented: https://developer.bigfix.com/action-script/reference/flow-control/if-elseif-else-endif.html
