I don't see it as a bug; the shell shouldn't get to see what was written to the terminal? BTW, it's the readline library that handles the Ctrl-L key binding to

I don't see it as a bug; the shell shouldn't get to see what was written to the terminal? BTW, it's the readline library that handles the Ctrl-L key binding to clear the screen rather than bash per se. $ bind -p | grep '\\C-l' "\C-l": clear-screen $