# clear 1

    clear(1)                    General Commands Manual                   clear(1)

## NAME

           clear - clear the terminal screen

## SYNOPSIS

           clear [-Ttype] [-V] [-x]

## DESCRIPTION

           clear  clears your screen if this is possible, including its scrollback
           buffer (if the extended "E3" capability is defined).   clear  looks  in
           the environment for the terminal type given by the environment variable
           TERM, and then in the terminfo database to determine how to  clear  the
           screen.

           clear  writes  to  the  standard output.  You can redirect the standard
           output to a file (which  prevents  clear  from  actually  clearing  the
           screen),  and  later  cat  the  file to the screen, clearing it at that
           point.

## OPTIONS

           -T type
                indicates the type of terminal.  Normally this option is  unneces-
                sary,  because  the default is taken from the environment variable
                TERM.  If -T is specified, then the shell variables LINES and COL-
                UMNS will also be ignored.

           -V   reports the version of ncurses which was used in this program, and
                exits.  The options are as follows:

           -x   do not attempt to clear the terminal's scrollback buffer using the
                extended "E3" capability.

## HISTORY

           A  clear  command  appeared  in 2.79BSD dated February 24, 1979.  Later
           that was provided in Unix 8th edition (1985).

           AT&T adapted a different BSD program  (tset)  to  make  a  new  command
           (tput),  and used this to replace the clear command with a shell script
           which calls tput clear, e.g.,

               /usr/bin/tput ${1:+-T$1} clear 2> /dev/null
               exit

           In 1989, when Keith Bostic revised the BSD tput command to make it sim-
           ilar to the AT&T tput, he added a shell script for the clear command:

               exec tput clear

           The remainder of the script in each case is a copyright notice.

           The  ncurses  clear  command began in 1995 by adapting the original BSD
           clear command (with terminfo, of course).

           The E3 extension came later:

           o   In June 1999, xterm provided an extension to the  standard  control
               sequence  for  clearing  the screen.  Rather than clearing just the
               visible part of the screen using

                   printf '\033[2J'

               one could clear the scrollback using

                   printf '\033[3J'

               This is documented in XTerm Control Sequences as a  feature  origi-
               nating with xterm.

           o   A few other terminal developers adopted the feature, e.g., PuTTY in
               2006.

           o   In April 2011, a Red Hat developer submitted a patch to  the  Linux
               kernel,  modifying  its  console  driver to do the same thing.  The
               Linux change, part of the  3.0  release,  did  not  mention  xterm,
               although it was cited in the Red Hat bug report (#683733) which led
               to the change.

           o   Again, a few other terminal developers adopted  the  feature.   But
               the next relevant step was a change to the clear program in 2013 to
               incorporate this extension.

           o   In 2013, the E3 extension was overlooked in tput with  the  "clear"
               parameter.   That  was  addressed  in  2016 by reorganizing tput to
               share its logic with clear and tset.

## PORTABILITY

           Neither IEEE Std 1003.1/The Open  Group  Base  Specifications  Issue  7
           (POSIX.1-2008) nor X/Open Curses Issue 7 documents tset or reset.

           The  latter documents tput, which could be used to replace this utility
           either via a shell script or by an alias (such as a symbolic  link)  to
           run tput as clear.

## SEE ALSO

           tput(1), terminfo(5)

           This describes ncurses version 6.1 (patch 20191214).

                                                                          clear(1)