Comments on: Screenshot: How to get a screenshot in linux using command line tools: xwininfo, convert.

By: Tom Kacperski

Tom Kacperski — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 06:22:55 +0000

Hey imchairmanm,

Thanks for the followup. Appreciated.

Yup. You certainly can. Can’t recall now why I threw in xwininfo (I’ve used this command for what seamed like decades). I suspect that either xwd didn’t return proper windows results (ie was getting the ID differently which didn’t work) or xwininfo was more reliable at the time (or simply threw in xwininfo as a reminder to myself on how to get window information - ). I don’t recall now.

Anyway, you can definitely use xwd without xwininfo as you pointed out.

Thanks,

By: imchairmanm

imchairmanm — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 23:59:12 +0000

oops. the “-out hi” should be “-out screenshot.pcx”. I was trying some examples and forgot to change that. So the command I was asking about was:

xwd -out screenshot.pcx; convert -colors 256 -dither screenshot.pcx screenshot.jpg;if [ -f `pwd`"/screenshot.jpg" ]; then echo “File saved to ’screenshot.jpg’”; fi

By: imchairmanm

imchairmanm — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 23:56:41 +0000

Very interesting. I like it.

I was looking through it and looking at all of the commands used however and I’m not sure why you need to use xwininfo at all. xwd without the “-id” argument specified seems to give you the same + sign to choose the window and seems to produce the same results. Why can’t this just be shortened to:

xwd -out hi; convert -colors 256 -dither screenshot.pcx screenshot.jpg;if [ -f `pwd`"/screenshot.jpg" ]; then echo “File saved to ’screenshot.jpg’”; fi

That seems to work fine for me. Is there a reason why using xwininfo is better?