Hi.

Please redirect to VTE, if it's an issue there :-)

clear(1) is documented to:
>clears your screen if this is possible, including its scrollback
>buffer (if the extended "E3" capability is defined).   clear  looks  in
>the environment for the terminal type and then in the terminfo database
>to determine how to clear the screen.

This doesn't fully work, while it clears the screen, the scrollback buffer is not cleared (e.g. I can go up and see everything that was previously on the screen there).

This issue seems to be *not* directly related to the fact the GNOME Terminal wrongly announces itself as TERM=xterm[-256color], cause if one manually sets TERM=gnome clear wouldn't work either.


I've increased the severity to major, since this may be actually security relevant:
People may e.g. want to have their screen cleared when they log out from remote SSH sessions or when they su'ed to some other user, because confident information might have been printed to the terminal during that session.
With clear not working, this goal wouldn't be achieved.

Interestingly, reset(1) does just that job.


Cheers,
Chris