Is there a way to clear the terminal screen during a running process?

For example, I'm running tail -f someLogFile. My screen has gotten full to the point that only the last line is changing. I now want to clear the screen; but the usual Ctrl+L doesn't work, just shows me the output ^L.

Using Ctrl + L Won't work as input from keyboard is not accepted, but You can do this:

Toolbar options of Terminal -> Terminal -> Reset and clear

This will do the trick!

hope this helps!

For Ubuntu (16.04) :

Go to Terminal > Preferences > Shortcuts (tab) > Under "Terminal Section" > set Shortcut key for "Reset" and "Reset and Clear" , It is disabled by default.

Hope this helps!

ctrl+l unfortunately doesn't work during tail.

There are a few things you could do. If you are using the default unity terminal, you can go to Terminal > Reset and clear.

If you are not using a graphic terminal or you're using a different terminal The best thing you could do is run the log into a text file using

tail -f /foo/bar > ~/output.txt

then you can view it using a text editor. That would let you scroll the file manually.