[Techtalk] prevent screen from clearing

[David Sumbler]

Akkana Peck <akkana at shallowsky.com> writes:

> gabrielle writes:
>> Using the (I assume bash) terminal window on my linux desktop (gnome on
>> fedora core 3) there is this really annoying "feature" configured - when
>> I view a document (with vi, view, man, who knows what else) and then
>> exit out of the document, the screen clears.  This bugs the crap out of
>> me because a lot of time I'll page through a man page until I find what
>> I was looking for, and then quit out of it, expecting the stuff I was
>> just looking at to stay on the page (and in the scroll buffer) for
>> reference.  I can get around it by piping the output through "more" but
>> I'm thinking I shouldn't have to do that, just because I don't have to
>> do it in bash on my solaris boxes. ;)
>>
>> Where do I look to configure this?
>
> That drives me crazy too! I'm glad I'm not the only one.
>
> How to configure it depends on what terminal you're using.

I'd love it if I could get this behaviour - it's always annoyed me,
too, that everything disappears when you want to read it and, perhaps,
type a command whilst referring to the relevant bit of a man page.

I mostly use virtual consoles (i.e. not using X).  I've looked at
various man pages etc. and got a bit bewildered.  On my Fedora Core 4
system I seem to have $TERM set to 'linux'.  But when I tried to look
at /usr/share/terminfo/l/linux I found that it is not human-readable.
'file' reports "RISC OS archive (spark format)".

Any hints?

David

-- 

David Sumbler

david at aeolia.co.uk