What is the terminal command to take a screenshot?

Question

What command(s) can I use in the terminal that's equivalent to the PrtSc (Print Screen) button?

Answer 1

You can use import tool available in the ImageMagick package (you need to install this if its already not available on your system).

Run the following command in a shell:

import screenshot.png

and select the window you want to capture or select a region by pressing the left mouse button and dragging.

import is a actually a very powerful command which can be used in many ways to > capture the screen. For example, to capture the entire screen and after some delay and resizing it, use the following command:

import -window root -resize 400×300 -delay 200 screenshot.png

To see all the options available with import command, go to ImageMagick’s website.

Source and more info.

Another way to take a screenshot from the terminal is with scrot

To install scrot type:

sudo apt-get install scrot

To take a screenshot in Linux from the terminal with scrot type:

scrot MyScreenshot.png

Some more options with scrot are here:

scrot -b -d 5 '%Y:%m:%d:%H:%M:%S.png' -e 'mv $f ~/Desktop/'

In this example,

• -b specifies including the window borders
• -d specifies a delay of five seconds
• '%Y:%m:%d:%H:%M:%S.png' will save the screenshot with a name based on the current date and time and with the format specified, .png in this case
• -e 'mv $f ~/Desktop/' tells scrot to save the screenshot to the Desktop

Answer 2

Found this option here and other options are also listed.

Open terminal by pressing Ctrl + Alt + T and type

gnome-screenshot

use gnome-screenshot -d xx to delay the action.

To delay the screenshot action by 10s

gnome-screenshot -d 10

or

sleep 10;gnome-screenshot

Answer 3

A simple way to save the active window is to press Alt+PrtScr at the same time. This will take a shot of this window and ask you if you want to save it. If you answer 'Yes', it will save it for you in your Pictures folder and you can use it like any other file.