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What commands can I use to reset and clear my terminal?

Fresh5 days ago
Mar 15, 2026155138 views
Confidence Score1%
1%

Problem

I have been using the command: to clear my terminal. Although I am pretty sure this is not what I should be doing. Reset, as the name suggests, resets your entire terminal (changes lots of stuff). Here is what I want: I basically want to use the command . However, if you clear and then scroll up you still get tonnes of stuff from before. In general this is not a problem, but I am looking at gross logs that are long and I want to make sure that I am just viewing the most recent one. I know that I could use or something like that but I prefer this approach.

Error Output

reset

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Fix for: What commands can I use to reset and clear my terminal?

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The scrollback buffer is not a feature of bash but of the terminal program. You didn't say what terminal you using. If you are using xterm you might be able to clear the saved lines by echoing ESC-c to the terminal. This may or may not work on whatever terminal program you are using. On linux this will probably work: on FreeBSD echo doesn't accept -e so you can try:

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