clear doesn't actually clear the screen

[daviddoria]

When I compile a program, I would like to be able to scroll up and see the compiler outputs from the beginning. So I do

clear; make myprogram

The screen flashes clear and then starts compiling the code. The problem is, when I scroll up, the stuff that existed on the screen before i ran the clear command is still there! How can you actually get rid of the stuff that was there before so that when I scroll up it is very easy to see the beginning of the last command (because it is the only thing left!)?

Thanks!

Dave

[blueboy4]

That's how clear works; it just pushes stuff off the screen. I'm not sure you can get rid of the other commands and their outputs but I could be wrong.

Have you tried redirecting the output of your make myprogram to a file?

 make myprogram > file

I'm not sure if the result of the make command will still be displayed though.

[daviddoria]

It would be nice to just scroll up instead of opening the file that the output was redirected to - surely there is a way to do this?

[Dangermouse]

Hi this may help you a bit to record what happens in a terminal
http://linux.byexamples.com/archives...-replay-later/
or a more simple way is just go to edit in a terminal and change the current profile (increase scrolling and size)
and if you want to get rid of the history altogether then type

history -c

[daviddoria]

history -c doesn't seem to remove anything from the terminal, just the "history" (ie. when you type history there is nothing in the list anymore)

recording the terminal is cool , but not any better than > in this case !

any other ideas on how to actually clear the terminal so when you scroll up there is nothing there?

[EnglandA]

Try typing "reset" instead of "clear". Also useful when you accidentally cat a binary file and your prompt goes all double-dutch on you =o)

[daviddoria]

ahhh sweet - thats what I was looking for!!

[jimbux]

'reset' works, it's just kinda sluggish. Many years ago I had "clear" aliased to some escape sequences that would clear the scroll buffer and the screen. This used to work on an SGI:

alias clear "echo -n '\033[14/y'"

I can't find anything for xterm that works like that. It would be wonderful if /usr/sbin/clear had an option to clear an xterm's scroll back buffer.

Ya, you can use "reset" (alias clear to reset) but I'm not as fond of how it works as how snappy and wonderful those old escape sequences worked. As the OP said, I also do the kind of thing he mentioned all the time. I.e.,

% clear; <some_verbose_command>

so that I can grab the scroll bar, and jam it up to the top and quickly find all the output from the command.

Anyone have any knowledge about some magic xterm escape sequence that WILL clear the scroll back buffer?

J.