PURITY(6)

💖 PURITY(6) 💖

okay bestie, gather round, because we're about to talk about purity — a general purpose purity test, straight out of the Games Manual section of your friendly neighbourhood Unix docs. it's giving "slumber party questionnaire but make it a man page" and honestly? iconic. 🎀

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✨ NAME ✨

purity — a general purpose purity test 💅

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

/usr/games/purity [ flags ] [ testname ]

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so purity is an interactive purity test program, and it's got a simple user interface and a simple datafile format — lowkey the whole point. for each test, the questions get printed to your terminal, and then you get prompted for an answer to the current question. and at that prompt, these are your choices, bestie:

• y — answer "yes" to the question. slay.
• n — answer "no" to the question.
• b — Backup one question. use this if you answered it incorrectly, or if someone is watching you take the test and you don't (or do) want to admit a different answer. 👀
• r — redraw the current question.
• q — quit the test, and print the current score. bye bestie 🫶
• ? — print a help screen for the current prompt.
• k — kill a section of the test. this skips all the questions of the test until the next subject heading. dramatic but effective 💀
• a — toggle answer mode between real answers and obfuscated answers. real answers print "yes" and "no", while obfuscated answers are "Maybe" and "maybe". obfuscated answers are preferred if you're shy and don't want people reading your answers over your shoulder while you take the test. main character privacy energy ✨
• d — toggle dERanGe output.
• s — print your current score on the test you're taking.
• l — toggle score logging.

at the end of the test, your score is printed out. and for most purity tests, lower scores denote more "experience" of the test material. no cap. 😭

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💅 FLAGS 💅

these are the command line flags for the test, queen:

• -a — show real answers (i.e. "yes" and "no") instead of obfuscated ones (i.e. "Maybe" and "maybe") as you answer the questions.
• -d — PrINt THe tESt in DerANgeD pRInT. truly unhinged, we love that for us.
• -f — take the test in fast mode. only the questions are printed, and not any other text blocks, like the introduction, subject headers, and the conclusion. speedrun vibes 🏃
• -l — take the test without having your score logged.
• -p — print the test without prompting for answers. this is useful for making hard copies of the tests without having to edit out the prompts by hand.
• -r — decrypt the test using the Rot 13 algorithm. this is done as a form of "protection", such that if you read a rot13 test and it offends you, it's your own fault. 🙈
• -z — zoom through more prompts in large text blocks. the default is to prompt the user for more when a screenful of text has been printed without any user input.

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🎀 DATAFILE FORMAT 🎀

the format of the datafiles is a very simple format, intended such that new tests can quickly and easily be converted to run with the test. we stan an accessible data format.

there are four types of text in a purity test datafile. each type is contained in a bracket type of punctuation. the definitions are as follows:

the styles of text blocks are:

{ plain text block }

[ subject header ]

( test question )

and  < conclusion >

• plain text blocks are printed out character for character. no notes.
• subject headers are preceded by their subject numbers, starting at 1, and then printed as text blocks.
• questions are preceded by their numbers, and then prompt the user to answer the question, keeping track of the user's current score.
• conclusions first calculate and print the user's score for the test, then print out the conclusion as a text block.

if you wish to include any of the various bracket punctuation in your text, the backslash ("\") character will escape the next character. iykyk 🧚

to print a question with parentheses, you would use the following format:

(have you ever written a purity test \(like this one\)?)

the output would be this:

   1.  have you ever written a purity test (like this one)?

and then it would have asked the user for her/his answer.

for a generic datafile, use the "sample" datafile for the test. periodt.

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⭐ FILES ⭐

• /var/games/purity.scores — the score logfile
• /usr/share/games/purity/* — test data files

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

Eric Lechner, lechner@ucscb.ucsc.edu — the original main character. we thank him for his service 🫡

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okay that's the whole page bestie, and fr fr every last detail made it in. this edition of the PURITY(6) man page is dated 18 December 1989, so yeah, it's vintage — it's giving retro but make it timeless. take the test, log your score, and remember: lower is experience, higher is innocence, and either way you ate. 💖✨🦋