clear(1) User Commands clear(1)NAME
clear - clear the terminal screen
SYNOPSIS
clear [term]
DESCRIPTION
The clear utility clears the terminal screen if this is possible. It looks in the environment for the terminal type, if this is not already
specified by the term operand, and then looks up the terminfo database to figure out how to clear the screen.
OPERANDS
term Indicates the type of terminal. Normally, this operand is unnecessary because the default is taken from the environment variable
TERM.
ATTRIBUTES
See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
| ATTRIBUTE TYPE | ATTRIBUTE VALUE |
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
|Availability |SUNWcsu |
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
SEE ALSO tput(1), attributes(5)SunOS 5.11 12 Jul 2002 clear(1)
Check Out this Related Man Page
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 unnecessary, because the default is taken from the environment variable TERM.
If -T is specified, then the shell variables LINES and COLUMNS 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 similar 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 vis-
ible part of the screen using
printf '