Greg Wooledge:
The man page for clear_console(1) is a little
unclear to me, and a little bit disturbing. I cannot figure out
what "changes the foreground virtual terminal to another
terminal" is supposed to mean, but between that and the
reference to chvt(1) under SEE ALSO, it seems like
someone might want to investigate that more closely.
I already did, years ago. It is why I years ago wrote and
published a replacement clear_console
that just uses the control sequences to clear the scrollback
buffer, gaining the benefit of working remotely, with GUI terminal
emulators, and with PuTTY along the way. It has been in the nosh
toolset since version 1.19 in 2015. The original clear_console
from the Bourne Again shell package is, in contrast, using the
side-effects of switching between KVTs as a way of clearing the
scrollback buffer. It switches them back and forth very rapidly.
I
explained this in this very mailing list three years ago. I also
explained it in the 1.19 announcement, also on this very
mailing list, pointing to a whole bunch of Debian bugs. I also
explained it on Unix and Linux StackExchange. It's even
explained in the manual. (-: