RedHat and SuSE take the program reset from ncurses, where reset is a name for the program tset. It is approximately equivalent to stty sane; tputs rs1; tputs rs2; tputs rf with `tputs rf' replaced by `tputs if' when there is an init_file but no reset_file. In the comments it wonders whether also sending rs3, rmacs, rmul, rmm might be a good idea. Slackware uses the small script given here. The part `echo -e \\033c' is the canonical reset of the kernel console status, and is equivalent to `tputs rs1' for a linux terminal. So, both versions are approximately the same. [A disadvantage of `echo -e \\033c' might be that it is potentially wrong on a non-vt100, non-xterm, non-linux terminal. An advantage is that there are terminfo entries for xterm around that only use rs1=^O as reset, and then \Ec is much better.]