How can I clear the console window after grep fills the screen?

Question

Is there a way to clear up what is displayed on the shell console (in ubuntu linux) in just a single key or two? When I get flood of lines from grep and that exceeds the height of the window, I want to quickly scroll back to the position where I typed the command after the prompt. I can do so if I had opened a fresh terminal before I type the command, and just go to the initial position. But if keep using the same terminal window, I have to manually find the position. Ctrl+l is not an answer because it just scrolls, and the contents of the terminal remains. I cannot use less because the colored output of grep does not show up.

Answer 1

If the console gets jammed/full then:

• reset will clear and reset the state. You can also cause this to be sent via the magic sequence Ctrl-v Esc c Enter
• clear if you just want to clear the screen; you might combine it with the output you're after: clear ; grep -r …

(BTW, reboot is a separate command, so don't worry about accidentally rebooting your machine by using clear or reset!).

Answer 2

You can actually stick with using less - try this:

grep --color=always foo * | less -r

That will tell grep to ignore that its output is being piped, and the "-r" on less tells it to pass through raw control characters, which in this case are the color codes.