l -e 'print "x" x 40, "\e[44m\n", "x" x 40, "\e[0m\n"' causes the line that was started as a result of the line feed to be completely filled with the currently active background color instead of the default color. When scrolling, part of the current screen is memcpy'd/memmove'd to the new region, and the new line(s) that will appear as a result are cleared using memset. However, the lines are cleared with vc->vc_video_erase_char, causing them to be colored with the currently active background color. This is different from X11 terminal emulators which always paint the new lines with the default background color (e.g. `xterm -bg black`). The clear operation (\e[1J and \e[2J) also use vc_video_erase_char, so a new vc->vc_scrl_erase_char is introduced with contains the erase character used for scrolling, which is built from vc->vc_def_color instead of vc->vc_color. Signed-off-by: Jan Engelhardt Cc: "Antonino A. Daplas" Cc: "H. Peter Anvin" Cc: Alan Cox Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds ·"