ncursesw-morphos/doc/html/man/clear.1.html
Thomas E. Dickey ce4803687b ncurses 6.0 - patch 20170218
+ fix several formatting issues with manual pages.
+ correct read of terminfo entry in which all strings are absent or
  explicitly cancelled.  Before this fix, the result was that all were
  treated as only absent.
+ modify infocmp to suppress mixture of absent/cancelled capabilities
  that would only show as "NULL, NULL", unless the -q option is used,
  e.g., to show "-, @" or "@, -".
2017-02-19 02:52:26 +00:00

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* @Id: clear.1,v 1.16 2016/12/31 16:09:34 tom Exp @
* these would be fallbacks for DS/DE,
* but groff changed the meaning of the macros.
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<H1 class="no-header">clear 1</H1>
<PRE>
<STRONG><A HREF="clear.1.html">clear(1)</A></STRONG> <STRONG><A HREF="clear.1.html">clear(1)</A></STRONG>
</PRE><H2><a name="h2-NAME">NAME</a></H2><PRE>
<STRONG>clear</STRONG> - clear the terminal screen
</PRE><H2><a name="h2-SYNOPSIS">SYNOPSIS</a></H2><PRE>
<STRONG>clear</STRONG>
</PRE><H2><a name="h2-DESCRIPTION">DESCRIPTION</a></H2><PRE>
<STRONG>clear</STRONG> clears your screen if this is possible, including
its scrollback buffer (if the extended "E3" capability is
defined). <STRONG>clear</STRONG> looks in the environment for the terminal
type given by the environment variable <STRONG>TERM</STRONG>, and then in
the <STRONG>terminfo</STRONG> database to determine how to clear the
screen.
<STRONG>clear</STRONG> writes to the standard output. You can redirect the
standard output to a file (which prevents <STRONG>clear</STRONG> from actu-
ally clearing the screen), and later <STRONG>cat</STRONG> the file to the
screen, clearing it at that point.
<STRONG>clear</STRONG> ignores any command-line parameters that may be
present. The analogous "<STRONG>tput</STRONG> clear" has command-line
parameters including <STRONG>-T</STRONG> for overriding the <STRONG>TERM</STRONG> environ-
ment variable.
</PRE><H2><a name="h2-HISTORY">HISTORY</a></H2><PRE>
A <STRONG>clear</STRONG> command appeared in 2.79BSD dated February 24,
1979. Later that was provided in Unix 8th edition (1985).
AT&amp;T adapted a different BSD program (<STRONG>tset</STRONG>) to make a new
command (<STRONG>tput</STRONG>), and used this to replace the <STRONG>clear</STRONG> command
with a shell script which calls <STRONG>tput</STRONG> <STRONG>clear</STRONG>, e.g.,
/usr/bin/tput ${1:+-T$1} clear 2&gt; /dev/null
exit
In 1989, when Keith Bostic revised the BSD <STRONG>tput</STRONG> command to
make it similar to the AT&amp;T <STRONG>tput</STRONG>, he added a shell script
for the <STRONG>clear</STRONG> command:
exec tput clear
The remainder of the script in each case is a copyright
notice.
The ncurses <STRONG>clear</STRONG> command began in 1995 by adapting the
original BSD <STRONG>clear</STRONG> command (with terminfo, of course).
The <STRONG>E3</STRONG> extension came later:
<STRONG>o</STRONG> In June 1999, xterm provided an extension to the stan-
dard control sequence for clearing the screen. Rather
than clearing just the visible part of the screen
using
printf '\033[2J'
one could clear the <EM>scrollback</EM> using
printf '\033[<STRONG>3</STRONG>J'
This is documented in <EM>XTerm</EM> <EM>Control</EM> <EM>Sequences</EM> as a
feature originating with xterm.
<STRONG>o</STRONG> A few other terminal developers adopted the feature,
e.g., PuTTY in 2006.
<STRONG>o</STRONG> In April 2011, a Red Hat developer submitted a patch
to the Linux kernel, modifying its console driver to
do the same thing. The Linux change, part of the 3.0
release, did not mention xterm, although it was cited
in the Red Hat bug report (#683733) which led to the
change.
<STRONG>o</STRONG> Again, a few other terminal developers adopted the
feature. But the next relevant step was a change to
the <STRONG>clear</STRONG> program in 2013 to incorporate this exten-
sion.
<STRONG>o</STRONG> In 2013, the <STRONG>E3</STRONG> extension was overlooked in <STRONG>tput</STRONG> with
the "clear" parameter. That was addressed in 2016 by
reorganizing <STRONG>tput</STRONG> to share its logic with <STRONG>clear</STRONG> and
<STRONG>tset</STRONG>.
</PRE><H2><a name="h2-PORTABILITY">PORTABILITY</a></H2><PRE>
Neither IEEE Std 1003.1/The Open Group Base Specifica-
tions Issue 7 (POSIX.1-2008) nor X/Open Curses Issue 7
documents tset or reset.
The latter documents <STRONG>tput</STRONG>, which could be used to replace
this utility either via a shell script or by an alias
(such as a symbolic link) to run <STRONG>tput</STRONG> as <STRONG>clear</STRONG>.
</PRE><H2><a name="h2-SEE-ALSO">SEE ALSO</a></H2><PRE>
<STRONG><A HREF="tput.1.html">tput(1)</A></STRONG>, <STRONG><A HREF="terminfo.5.html">terminfo(5)</A></STRONG>
This describes <STRONG>ncurses</STRONG> version 6.0 (patch 20170218).
<STRONG><A HREF="clear.1.html">clear(1)</A></STRONG>
</PRE>
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<li><a href="#h2-NAME">NAME</a></li>
<li><a href="#h2-SYNOPSIS">SYNOPSIS</a></li>
<li><a href="#h2-DESCRIPTION">DESCRIPTION</a></li>
<li><a href="#h2-HISTORY">HISTORY</a></li>
<li><a href="#h2-PORTABILITY">PORTABILITY</a></li>
<li><a href="#h2-SEE-ALSO">SEE ALSO</a></li>
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