Agreed, and clear won't help if you accidentally cat some binary code and put the terminal into "goofy symbols mode". In that case it's important to remember th

Agreed, and clear won't help if you accidentally cat some binary code and put the terminal into "goofy symbols mode". In that case it's important to remember the reset command, especially if there's something vital running in that terminal and you can't just kill it. But ctrl-r in bash starts a reverse history search, which is also very useful. It doesn't clear the screen, at least not the way it's configured on my linux machines. See: http://www.talug.org/events/20030709/cmdline_history.html http://www.talug.org/events/20030709/cmdline_history.html