I'm trying to get CTRL + L to work under solaris 10,
So I tried to add a binding to ~/.inputrc
"\C-l":'clear\n' Well it did bind to the clear command, but clear command itself fails, sigh.
Any ideas?
P.S I've tried to set TERM variable to linux or xterm, which does not help.
EDIT
Instead of modifying inputrc, looks like I should do
export TERM=xterm Solaris simply does not work with xterm-256color, which is set by iTerm2 by default.
You should try to bind it like this:
"\C-l":clear-screen That did work at least for me on my CentOS 7 test machine. Unfortunately I could not find any manual reference for this now, but there is this mentioned on bash man page:
clear-screen (C-l) Clear the screen leaving the current line at the top of the screen. With an argument, refresh the current line without clearing the screen. 
clear command doesn't clear the screen, the problem that you have is some sort of terminfo problem. That is what you need to fix, leaving the readline configuration with the normal binding, as given here. Unfortunately, you haven't shown answerers the important stuff: what terminal type you are using, what terminal emulator program you are using, and a syscall trace (or hex dump of the of the output) of the clear command. Hence answers that don't address terminfo at all.
printf '\033\143'clear your screen?echo $'"\C-l": "printf \'\\033c\'\015"' >> ~/.inputrc, thenctrl-x ctrl-rto re-read~/.inputrc, then tryctrl-l.