Selecting by the Active Property

Objects can be selected by querying the active property using the selection criteria “a”. All objects that are active (i.e., have had the active property set) are selected. (By default, objects are considered active.) For example, in the following command, all objects which are active are selected for use by the ZOMLIST service:

ZOMList +p a

Normally, objects that are considered inactive (i.e., do not have the active property set) are not processed by the ZOM services. However, you can explicitly make inactive objects available for processing by using the special processing option ;i. For example, in the following command all active and inactive objects are selected for use by the ZOMLIST service:

ZOMList * ;i

In the next example, only the inactive objects are selected:

ZOMList +p a! ;i

In this case, ;i makes inactive objects available for processing and +p a! selects only the not active objects. Note that without ;i, the above command would select no objects at all since the normal behavior is to ignore inactive objects entirely.