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copied!<p>In order to manipulate the terminal you have to use <em>control sequences</em>. Unfortunately, those codes depend on the particular terminal you are using. That's why <code>terminfo</code> (previously <code>termcap</code>) exists in the first place.</p> <p>You don't say if you want to use terminfo or not. So:</p> <ul> <li>If you will use terminfo, it will give you the correct control sequence for each action your terminal supports.</li> <li>If you won't use terminfo... well, you have to manually code every action in every terminal type you want to support.</li> </ul> <p>As you want this for learning purposes, I'll elaborate in the second.</p> <p>You can discover the terminal type you are using from the environment variable <code>$TERM</code>. In linux the most usual are <code>xterm</code> for terminal emulators (XTerm, gnome-terminal, konsole), and <code>linux</code> for virtual terminals (those when X is not running).</p> <p>You can discover the control sequences easily with command <code>tput</code>. But as <code>tput</code> prints them on the console, they will apply immediately, so if you want to really see them, use:</p> <pre><code>$ TERM=xterm tput clear | hd 00000000 1b 5b 48 1b 5b 32 4a |.[H.[2J| $ TERM=linux tput clear | hd 00000000 1b 5b 48 1b 5b 4a |.[H.[J| </code></pre> <p>That is, to clear the screen in a <code>xterm</code> you have to output <code>ESC [ H ESC [ 2J</code> in an xterm but <code>ESC [ H ESC [ J</code> in a linux terminal.</p> <p>About the particular commands you ask about, you should read carefully <code>man 5 terminfo</code>. There is a lot of information there.</p>

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