How can I clear previous output in Terminal in Mac OS X

Question

I know the clear command that  clears  the current screen  but it does this just by printing lots of newlines - the cleared contents just get scrolled up  Is there a way to completely wipe all previous output from the terminal so that I can t reach it even by scrolling up

User · Answer

The pretty way is printf   33c e 3J

User · Answer

Do the right thing  do the thing right  Clear to previous mark  Command   L Clear to previous bookmark  Option   Command   L Clear to start  Command   K

User · Answer

To delete the last output only      L To clear the terminal completely      K

User · Answer

Or you can send a page break  ASCII form feed  by pressing Ctrl   L  While this technically just starts a new page  this has the same net effect as all the other methods  while being a lot faster  except for the Apple   K solution  of course   And because this is an ASCII control command  and it works in all shells

User · Answer

Typing the following in the terminal will erase your history  meaning using up arrow will get you nothing   but it will not clear the screen  history -c

User · Answer

Command   K will clear previous output  To clear entered text  first jump left with Command   A and then clear the text to the right of the pointer with Control   K  Visual examples

User · Answer

I couldn t get any of the previous answers to work  on macOS   A combination worked for me - IO write  quot  e H e 2J e 3J quot   This clears the buffer and the screen

User · Answer

With Mac  OS  X v10 10  Yosemite   use Option   Command   K to clear the scrollback in Terminal app

User · Answer

To clear the terminal manually     K  Command K for newer keyboards  To clear the terminal from within a shell script    usr bin osascript -e  tell application  System Events  to tell process  Terminal  to keystroke  k  using command down

User · Answer

Put this in your  bash profile or  bashrc file  function cls       osascript -e  tell application  quot System Events quot  to keystroke  quot k quot  using command down

User · Answer

A better way to clear the screen from within a script    If you re using the OS  X Terminal app  as stated by the OP   a better approach  thanks to Chris Page s answer to How do I reset the scrollback in the terminal via a shell command   is just this  clear  amp  amp  printf   e 3J   or more concisely  hat tip to user qiuyi   printf   33c e 3J   which clears the scrollback buffer as well as the screen  There are other options as well  See Chris Page s answer to How do I reset the scrollback in the terminal via a shell command  for more information  Original answer The AppleScript answer given in this thread works  but it has the nasty side effect of clearing any terminal window that happens to be active   This is surprising if you re running the script in one window and trying to get work done in another  You avoid this by refining the AppleScript to only clear the screen if it is frontmost by doing this  taken from MattiSG s answer to How do I reset the scrollback in the terminal via a shell command    osascript -e  if application  quot Terminal quot  is frontmost then tell application  quot System Events quot  to keystroke  quot k quot  using command down       but as when it s not the current window  the output will stack up until it becomes current again  which probably isn t what you want

User · Answer

clear  amp  amp  printf   e 3J   clears out everything  and it works well on OS  X as well  Very neat

User · Answer

CMD   K works for macOS  It clears the entire terminal output  but the environment remains

User · Answer

On Mac OS X Terminal  this functionality is already built in to the Terminal Application as menu View   Clear Scrollback  the default is CMD   K   So you can re-assign this as you like with Apple s Keyboard shortcuts  Just add a new shortcut for Terminal with the command  quot Clear Scrollback quot    I use CMD   L  because it s similar to Ctrl   L to clear the current screen contents  without clearing the buffer   I am not sure how you would use this in a script  maybe AppleScript as others have pointed out

[macos] How can I clear previous output in Terminal in Mac OS X?

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