Screenshots; everyone loves them – whether it’s to show off your new shiny desktop, or just to record something on the screen at that moment in time, we’ve all taken lots!
I guess at the moment a lot of screenshots are being taken with the GNOME tool, but what if you don’t use GNOME? What if you use one of the many other desktop environments, or maybe just a window manager on its own such as Fluxbox?
This is where scrot comes in – scrot is a command line based screen capsture tool based on the imlib2 library.
Usage is simple – open a terminal window:
scrot filename.png
… and it’s done. Of course, there are a wide range of other options as mentioned in the manpage: http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/jaunty/en/man1/scrot.1.html
scrot is available from within Ubuntu and Debian (apt-get install scrot) and probably your choice of distribution. It’s also available within BSD (It’s under /ports/graphics/scrot on FreeBSD for example). You can get the source from here: http://linuxbrit.co.uk/scrot/