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Take Screenshots in Linux with “scrot”

I have found this tool recently, and I have no idea how I was able to manage without it before.

This tool allows you to capture any region of your screen, by selecting it with your mouse, clicking on the title-bar of a window and other methods. It’s very flexible and contains many options.

To download the program in Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install scrot

Now, open a new text file and type this

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#!/bin/bash

scrot "/home/YourUsername/Desktop/screenshot`date +%d_%m_%y_%H_%M_%S_%N`.png" -s -q '85'

Don’t forget to replace YourUsername with your actual username. We’ll assume that you called the file “scrshot”

This script will call scrot, will tell it to save the screenshots on your desktop with names similar to screenshot14_11_08_00_36_41_278273217.png (I know the name looks ugly, but I love this nomenclature because it prevents file name conflicts). The -s flag is for “Select”: This will allow you to select any area/window with your mouse. The -q flag is for “Quality”: In the above script I set it to 85%, which is good enough. Note that increasing the quality will also increase the file size.

Now, make the file executable:

chmod +x scrshot

Add a new launcher to you gnome panel, give it a suitable name and let it execute the above script. (i.e., in the “Command” field, enter the path to the script, eg. /home/YouName/scripts/scrshot  or wherever you saved it).

No taking a screenshot is easy: Click the launcher, select a region, and go to your desktop to collect the resulting file.

Actually, scrot is more powerful than described in this post, one of its strong features is adding a delay so the script will wait for a given number of seconds before taking the screenshot.

For more options refer to the manual pages:

man scrot

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Tags: Command Line Interface, Linux, Shell Scripts