I'm looking for a way to clear STDOUT. I don't want to use 'flush' as I believe that goes ahead and sends what was already written to the filehandle. I need to clear it out completely, to prepare for new output (used for an error handling routine).

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Use:

`clear`;

or

qx/clear/;

....this isn't available on all systems.

1. Try making a system call, e.g.,
   
   
   Code:

   use system();
   system ('cls'); # or equivalent on your system.



2. Or look into the Term::Cap module available on CPAN.
   
   
   Code:

   use Term::Cap;
   
   $t = Tgetent Term::Cap {TERM=>undef, OSPEED=>9600};
   
   print $t->Tputs("cl");



3. Or you could look at an even simpler module found again on CPAN, called Term::Screen, which allows you to do something like:
   
   
   Code:

   use Term::Screen;
   
   my $terminal = new Term::Screen;
   
   $terminal->clrscr();

Hope this helps.

- wil

You don't need to load system to do a system call.

If you are going to do it that way you may want some error checking.

system('cls') == 0 or die "system('cls') failed: $?";

$exit_value = $? >> 8;
$signal_num = $? & 127;
$dumped_core = $? & 128;

And just out of curiosity...Why would you want to clear STDOUT, what is the significance of this?

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Crapshoot70 (this isn't my real name)
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