Clear a terminal screen for real

Question

Using the clear command on the terminal only fools the user into thinking the screen has been cleared   you can still see output from the previous commands when you scroll using the mouse  This makes life difficult when you are drowning in a tsunami of text    Various solutions  escape code etc   which can be found on the Internet are only variations of what the clear command already does   So how do you clear the contents of a terminal in Linux for real

User · Answer

Try reset   It clears up the terminal screen but the previous commands can be accessed through  arrow or whichever key binding you have

User · Answer

Use the following command to do a clear screen instead of merely adding new lines      printf   033c    yes that s a  printf  on the bash prompt   You will probably want to define an alias though     alias cls  printf   033c     Explanation   033     x1B    27    ESC   So this becomes  lt ESC gt c which is the VT100 escape code for resetting the terminal  Here is some more information on terminal escape codes   Edit  Here are a few other ways of doing it     printf   ec    e is ESC in bash echo -en   ec   thanks  Jonathon Reinhart    -e    Enable interpretation of of backslash escapes   -n    Do not output a new line   KDE  The above does not work on the KDE console  called Konsole  but there is hope  Use the following sequence of commands to clear the screen and the scroll-back buffer     clear  amp  amp  echo -en   e 3J    Or perhaps use the following alias on KDE     alias cls  clear  amp  amp  echo -en   e 3J     I got the scroll-back clearing command from here

User · Answer

My favorite human friendly command for this is  reset  Tested on xterm and VT100  It also helps after an abnormal program termination  Keeps the command buffer  so up-arrow will cycle through previous commands

User · Answer

echo -e   e 3J    This works in Linux Machines

User · Answer

Just to add that tmux scroll buffer does not clear with clear  reset or printf  You need to  clear-history  See link

User · Answer

With KDE and Ubuntu 12 04 LTS and the  Konsole  terminal  none of the posted answers work   However  pressing default keyboard shortcut CTRL Shift X does work   Source   https   bugs kde org show bug cgi id 288913

User · Answer

Compile this app    include  lt iostream gt   include  lt cstring gt   int main       char str 1000     memset str    n   999     str 999    0    std  cout  lt  lt  str  lt  lt  std  endl    return 0

User · Answer

tput reset   That will do the trick

User · Answer

The following link will explain how to make that alias permanent so you don t have to keep typing it in   https   askubuntu com questions 17536 how-do-i-create-a-permanent-bash-alias  These are the steps detailed at that link    vim    bashrc or gedit    bashrc or what ever text editor you like put alias cls  printf   033c   at the bottom of the file save and exit      bashrc   and yes there should be a space between   and    now check to see if everything worked    I take no credit for this information just passing it along

User · Answer

I know the solution employing printing of new lines isn t much supported  but if all else fails  why not  Especially where one is operating in an environment where someone else is likely to be able to see the screen  yet not able to keylog  One potential solution then  is the following alias   alias c  printf   r n  0s   1  50     Then  to  clear  away the current contents of the screen  or rather  hide them   just type c Enter at the terminal

User · Answer

None of the answers I read worked in PuTTY  so I found a comment on this article  In the settings for your connection  under  quot Window- gt Behavior quot  you ll find a setting  quot System Menu Appears on ALT alone quot   Then CTRL   L  ALT  l  that s a lower case L  will scroll the screen and then clear the scrollback buffer   relevant to the OP because I am connecting to an Ubuntu server  but also apparently relevant no matter what your server is running

[linux] Clear a terminal screen for real

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