# Why does my terminal get cleared every time I exit ssh?

When I exit from a session, my local terminal  
just went blank - not just the visible screen, the entire scrollback was gone too. Annoying to the point where I wanted to know exactly  
what happened.

Some upfront notes - the machine I was connecting to runs AlmaLinux 9 with zsh as the login shell. My local machine was running fish, but  
it turned out to be irrelevant.

## The Symptoms

Every time I do an interactive ssh session and exit, it looks like this:-

```plaintext
  kamal@server:~$ exit                                                                                                                     
  Connection to 267.100.278.345 closed.                                                                                                    
                                                                                                                                           
```

And that's it. The screen is blank, and I can no longer scroll up to see what I did a moment ago.

The usual suspects first - ~/.bashrc, ~/.bash\_logout, ~/.zshrc - none of them have anything to do with clear. Nothing. So what's clearing  
the screen?

## Reading The Escape Sequences

The terminal only clears if someone sends it an escape sequence. So let's catch the session with its hands dirty. I feed it a script to  
just run exit and capture everything the remote sends, rendered as visible characters:-

```bash
  printf 'exit\n' | ssh -tt -l kamal 200.100.200.100 2>/dev/null | cat -v | tail -c 300                                                    
```

And there it is, the last thing the remote wrote before hanging up:-

```plaintext
  ^[[H^[[2J^[[3J                                                                                                                           
```

That's cursor home, clear screen, clear scrollback. So the bytes come out of the remote shell on exit - not my local fish, not the  
terminal emulator, not oh-my-zsh. The remaining work is just finding who sent them.

## The Red Herring

The output also had some terminal-title escapes right before the clear, and the remote has oh-my-zsh, which has auto-title hooks.  
Suspicious. So I disabled the title with DISABLE\_AUTO\_TITLE="true" and tested again.

It didn't help. The screen was still cleared. Turns out those title escapes were just a neighbor in the byte stream. Good thing for me I  
actually captured the stream instead of guessing, otherwise I would have shipped a "fix" that does nothing.

## Isolating It

I kept bisecting with the same capture command. The pattern that stood out was this:-

*   zsh (non-login) inside the session, then exit -> not cleared
    
*   zsh -l (login) with a completely empty config, then exit -> cleared
    
*   bash -l, then exit -> not cleared
    

An empty config that still gets cleared means nothing in ~/.zshrc or oh-my-zsh is responsible. This is the shell package itself. And  
login-only, because sshd always starts the session shell in login mode.

## The Culprit

AlmaLinux's zsh package ships a file that I never once looked at because it doesn't even live under /etc/zsh/ - just /etc/zlogout:-

```bash
  #                                                                                                                                        
  # /etc/zlogout and ~/.zlogout are run when an interactive session ends                                                                   
  #                                                                                                                                        
  clear                                                                                                                                    
```

That's the whole file. It is run when an interactive login session ends, and it runs clear. Since it also clears the scrollback,  
everything I typed during the session is gone. On Debian-based distros the same file lives under /etc/zsh/ and this behavior is well-known

*   the RHEL family just hides it in a less obvious place.
    

## The Fix

Creating ~/.zlogout does not override it - zsh reads both, user first, then system. The documented trick is to tell zsh to stop reading rc files after this point:-

```bash
  echo 'setopt norcs' > ~/.zlogout                                                                                                         
```

norcs means "do not read the next rc file", which at this point of the shutdown is exactly /etc/zlogout and nothing else. After adding  
that, the same capture command shows a normal exit with none of the escape sequences. Testing my real flow - ssh in, do some work, exit -  
the scrollback survives now.

If you have root and want to fix it for everyone on that box, just truncate or remove the clear line in /etc/zlogout itself.