The *alternate screen* is used by many &quot;user-interactive&quot; terminal applications like vim, htop, screen, alsamixer, less, ... It is like a different buffer of the terminal content, which disappears when the application exits, so the whole terminal gets restored and it looks like the application hasn&#39;t output anything.

I&#39;d like to achieve exactly the same thing in my own shell (bash) script, except that it doesn&#39;t have to be that portable. I&#39;d stick to linux only and xterm-based terminal emulators; but the solution should use something like `tput` if it&#39;s possible. However, I don&#39;t want to use some external scripting language (or even something like C).

Although I don&#39;t want to use C (as it should be a bash-script with as few dependencies as possible), I had a look into the source code of less. It seems to use terminfo as the database and looks up the &quot;ti&quot; terminal capability in its initialisation. When removing the line, it doesn&#39;t use the alternate sceen, so I assumed that I found the responsible code line.

However, I can&#39;t find such a capability in `man terminfo`. But maybe I&#39;m on the wrong path finding a solution for this. Maybe terminfo / tput isn&#39;t my friend.

So (how) can I use the alternate screen in a bash script? Does somebody know a simple application in which source code I may find a hint? (C application or bash script or whatever...)

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Using the "alternate screen" in a bash script