Cross-Platform Console Clearing?

Question

What do I need to do if I want to clear the console without OS-Limitations? I know that on Linux and Mac the command "clear" exists, whereas Windows has "cls". I want to clear the console every now and then on the three major systems without personally choosing "clear" or "cls".

My idea so far was

import platform
os = platform.system()
if os == "Windows":
    clear = 'cls'
else:
    clear = 'clear'

and then just use clear as variable for both, depending on the OS, but it doesn't work. Is something like this actually possible?

Seems there is no better way, just different syntactical variations of what you've proposed - see the duplicate and other questions, which should be easy to find. — BartoszKP, Nov 19 '18 at 10:53

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 19 '18 at 11:07

0

For accuracy use sys and as a good practice use subprocess

#usr/bin/env python

from sys import platform
from subprocess import run

command = {'win32': 'cls', 'linux': 'clear'}

if __name__ == '__main__':
     run(command[platform], shell=True)

As BartoszKP said there are many ways of doing this, I find this a very clean way of doing it.

answered Nov 19 '18 at 11:07

Surister

132
3
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And for instance, your code snippet does work. – Surister Nov 19 '18 at 11:08
I feel a bit ashamed now. I checked my code again and realized that I shouldn't use "os" as variable when I want to call "os.system(clear)"... – Kasai kemono Nov 19 '18 at 11:51

Cross-Platform Console Clearing?

1 Answers1