## Ask

The Ask function is used to interact with a running action. You specify a prompt message to be displayed in the Action Pending Window. When the prompt dialog is displayed you can choose to cancel the action or set the action's test state to true or false. The prompt is only issued once per set of files when the action is not executing in Grouped Mode.

You can set the text color for the prompt to one of Black, Blue or Red.

You can elect to issue a beep with the prompt.

The default labels for the true and false buttons are oddly enough True and False. You can override these labels permanently in Preferences-Actions or temporarily via the Preferences statement. As a convenience you can specify alternate true and false labels directly in the action statement. Note that if the button labels are not empty they effectively execute a Preferences statement to set the values. This means that the labels remain as the current values even after the statement finishes its execution. If any of button label fields are empty the current value of the corresponding label is not modified. If you are going to supply inline labels, it is a good idea to do it on all Ask statements.

Typically the name of the action issuing the prompt, the file it is associated with and the reason for the prompt are displayed in the Pending Action window. You can disable the display of this information by selecting the Hide info option.

The supplied prompt string may contain any of the escape sequences described in Escape Sequences. The prompt is a multi line scrolling area.

The function is valid while batch processing but is intended to be used within the special Batch Start and Batch End inline actions.