How to clear the terminal screen on the Linux command line. Learn how to use the cleanup command in Linux with Ubuntu terminal cleanup examples.
Linux Command to Clear Terminal Screen
To clear the terminal screen in Linux Ubuntu, the simplest command is “clear” to clear the terminal screen:
clear
The clear command does not require any options on its own. Please note that in other terminal or UNIX emulators putty the clear command can simply clear the screen one page at a time and as you scroll you can still see the old screen and its results.
To prevent the scroll buffer from being cleared, you can use the clear command with the -x option:
clear -x
You can also use the reset command to clear your terminal screen. The reset command reinitializes the terminal. The reset command is useful when the terminal cannot shut down easily.
keyboard shortcut to clear terminal screen is Ctrl+L in Linux. The shortcut works in most terminal emulators. Note that Ctrl+L clears the output and moves the screen down one page. But you can still view the command output history by scrolling up.
Linux Command to Clear Terminal History
To clear the history, enter the following command:
history -c && history -w
OR
rm ~/.bash_history
Clear Bash Shell terminal history on logout
You can modify the above command to clear history on logout:
echo 'history -c' >> ~/.bash_logout
NOTE: The terminal history is stored in the “.bash_history” file located in the home directory.
