Save and restore terminal/screen content

This cool hack uses the terminal capabilities (see terminfo(5) manual) smcup and rmcup to save and restore the terminal content.

For sure, you’ve already seen those programs that restore the terminal contents after they did their work (like vim).

# save, clear screen
tput smcup
clear

# example "application" follows...
read -n1 -p "Press any key to continue..."
# example "application" ends here

# restore
tput rmcup