In Slackware, I have always had to manually fix the clear screen function associated with Ctrl-L for Rxvt unicode (urxvt). In version 9.16 of urxvt (and previous), fixing this problem required only editing /etc/termcap and adding the string rxvt-unicode to the term capabilities.

However, with the new version of urxvt, the string that has to be added to the term capabilities is different. To find out the correct string, start urxvt and type

$ export

See what the value of the TERM variable is. In my urxvt, the value is rxvt-unicode-256color. Now, edit the file /etc/termcap, find the line with

vs|xterm|xterm-color|...

and add the new value to the list. For example, in my case, I change the previous line to the following

vs|xterm|rxvt-unicode-256color|xterm-color|...

Tags: slackware