Tell fswatch to clear screen before running command?

Question

I have the following ruby script, foo, that I'm watching with fswatch:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

puts "hello world!"

on the command line the output looks like:

➜  ~/w/s/g/m/todo master ✗ fswatch bin/* | xargs -I {} bundle exec {}
hello world!
^C

Which seems all good, and as expected, I'm wondering, how would I tell fswatch to clear the screen before running the the bundle exec? Or write some sort of bash script to achieve the same goal or watching my files and running my commands but clearing the screen before-hand?

Answer 1

Recently had to figure this out myself. Try: fswatch bin/* | xargs -I {} sh -c 'clear && bundle exec {}'

Edit: Completely clearing the scrollback buffer will depend upon the actual terminal emulator program used. As an example, on macOS you could do one of the following:

• Terminal: The menu command is Edit > Clear to Start or ⌘K, so you could automate that in applescript and call in place of clear
• iTerm: supports handy proprietary escape codes - simply replace clear with printf "\033]1337;ClearScrollback\007"