MacOS – Display interactive notifications (with buttons) via Terminal

Terminal supports an extension of the ED (Erase in Display) escape sequence to erase the scroll-back. It is also supported by xterm. The ED command, described in the VT100 manual, accepts these values for the Ps parameter:

ESC [ Ps J

Parameter   Parameter Meaning

0           Erase from the active position to the end of the screen
1           Erase from start of the screen to the active position
2           Erase all of the display

Terminal (and xterm) adds:

3           Erase the scroll-back (aka “Saved Lines”)

Note that this only erases the scroll-back, not the screen. This allows you to erase one or the other, or both by sending two escape sequences.

For example, you can clear the screen and the scroll-back with the following shell command: clear && printf '\e[3J'

(The clear command looks up the appropriate sequence for clearing the screen for the current terminal, but the “erase scroll-back” escape sequence is custom and must be hard-coded. If you put this in a shell script that you don’t know for certain will only ever be run with Terminal, you should check that $TERM_PROGRAM is Apple_Terminal before sending it.)

For an exhaustive list, you can simply do ls for all of the directories in the shell's $PATH variable--that's what the shell uses to search for a command when you type it.

ls ${PATH//:/ }

The above runs ls using the path variable as an argument, but with the $PATH's usual : separators replaced by a space.