clear Command Cheat Sheet

clear provides a clean slate in your terminal window. While simple on the surface, understanding how it interacts with the scrollback buffer and different terminal emulators is useful for power users.

Synopsis

clear [options]

Description

clear clears your screen if this is possible. It looks in the environment for the terminal type and then in the terminfo database to figure out how to clear the screen.

Basic Usage

Standard Clear

clear

Moves the prompt to the top of the screen. In most modern graphical terminal emulators (GNOME Terminal, iTerm2, Alacritty), the previous output is pushed up into the scrollback buffer. You can still scroll up to see it.

Keyboard Shortcut

Ctrl + L

Equivalent to typing clear in bash, zsh, and many other shells. This is a readline library function (clear-screen).

Clearing Scrollback

By default, clear explicitly does not clear the scrollback buffer (the history you scroll up to see).

The "Real" Clear

To clear the screen and the scrollback buffer (so you can't scroll up):

# For some terminals
clear && printf '\e[3J'

Alternatively, use the terminal emulator's built-in shortcut: - macOS (Terminal/iTerm): Cmd + K - GNOME Terminal: Ctrl + L (often just clears screen), check View menu.

Using reset

If your terminal is corrupted (weird characters, broken encoding) and clear doesn't help:

reset

This re-initializes the terminal, clears the screen, and often clears the scrollback. It might take a second to run.

Options

clear ignores any command-line parameters that naturally appear in the logic of clearing the screen, but accepts standard GNU options.

clear -x (ncurses extension): Does not attempt to clear the terminal's scrollback buffer using the extended E3 capability.

clear -x

(This keeps the scroll position but moves prompt to top).

Alternatives and Aliases

Create a Super Clear

Add this to your .bashrc or .zshrc to clear everything:

alias cls='clear && printf "\e[3J"'

Python One-Liner

If clear command is missing (rare):

python3 -c 'import os; os.system("clear")'

Scripting Use Cases

Interactive Menus

Clear screen before showing a menu options.

#!/bin/bash
while true; do
    clear
    echo "1. Show Disk Usage"
    echo "2. Show Memory"
    echo "q. Quit"
    read -p "Choose: " choice
    case $choice in
        1) df -h; read -p "Press Enter...";;
        2) free -m; read -p "Press Enter...";;
        q) break;;
    esac
done

Watch Command

watch automatically clears the screen before updating.

watch -n 1 "date"

Technical Details

TERM env var: clear relies on the $TERM variable (e.g., xterm-256color) to look up the correct escape sequences in terminfo.
Exit Status: Returns 0 on success, 1 if terminal type is unknown.

Tips

Muscle Memory: Learn Ctrl+L. It is much faster than typing clear.
Binary Mess: If you accidentally cat a binary file and your terminal shows gibberish, type reset (even if you can't see what you are typing) and press Enter.
Preserve Context: Sometimes you don't want to clear. Use Enter a few times to visually separate output without hiding history.