Linux commands: clear

Sep 19, 2020

Learn how the Linux clear command wipes your terminal screen, the handy ctrl-L shortcut for it, and how clear -x clears but keeps your scrollback.

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Type clear to clear all the previous commands that were ran in the current terminal.

The screen will clear and you will just see the prompt at the top:

Terminal window showing a cleared screen with only the command prompt visible at the top

Note: this command has a handy shortcut: ctrl-L

Once you do that, you will lose access to scrolling to see the output of the previous commands entered.

So you might want to use clear -x instead, which still clears the screen, but lets you go back to see the previous work by scrolling up.

The clear command works on Linux, macOS, WSL, and anywhere you have a UNIX environment

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