console-clear 1 administrator commands nosh
console-clear clear_console clear a user-space virtual terminal
`console-clear` --7bit --8bit `clear_console` --7bit --8bit

## Description

`console-clear` emits control sequences to its standard output that instruct a compatible terminal emulator to clear its entire output, both display and any off-screen buffers.

It does not employ operating system and device specific ioctl 2 calls, and so can be used remotely and with terminal emulators other than the ones built into operating system kernels.

Rather, it emits simple terminal control sequences, by chaining to foreground 1 in order to run console-control-sequence 1 twice, once with --clear all and once with --clear scrollback.

It passes the the --7bit and --8bit command-line options straight through to `console-control-sequence`.

## Compatibility

For compatibility with the Bourne Again shell toolset, this command is also available as `clear_console`, whose functionality it duplicates. Unlike the Bourne Again shell toolset's `clear_console` command, this command is not specific to kernel virtual terminal character devices, does not involve switching kernel virtual terminals (a process that can go wrong if an X server happens to be using the "other" virtual terminal), and respects redirection of its standard output.

The use case for `clear_console` is clearing the whole display buffer on user logoff, which console-terminal-emulator 1 does anyway, as standard.

This command makes no attempt to behave differently if its output is not to a terminal, since one might want to use it to generate the control sequences to send to a file, a pipe, or a non-terminal device.

For compatibility of the actual control sequences emitted with various terminals and terminal emulators, see the console-control-sequence 1 manual.

## Author

Jonathan de Boyne Pollard