Linux clear Command with Examples

In Linux, clear is built-in command which is used to clear terminal screen.

This command runs on different distributions of Linux based operating systems like Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, Kali, Red Hat etc. In this tutorial we will discuss syntax for command echo with examples.

clear Syntax

The syntax for command clear is: 


clear

clear Examples

Before executing clear command


$ echo Alex
Alex
$ echo Hello
Hello
$ echo Linux
Linux
$ clear

After executing clear command


$

clear Description

In addition to clearing terminal window, clear does following things:

  1. clear clears your screen if this is possible, including its scrollback buffer.
  2. clearlooks in the environment for the terminal type given by the environment variable TERM, and then in the terminfo databas to determine how to clear the screen.
  3. 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.

For more detail, run man clear on terminal to get complete information about clear command.