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What software can I use to take screenshots with a set interval? I'd like to take screenshots every 2 second or so. Command-line and GUI are both ok.

I'd prefer software that can also resize and compress each screenshot.

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80% accept rate
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Good luck spying. – BlaXpirit Jun 28 '11 at 20:03
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5 Answers

up vote 11 down vote accepted

Install scrot and then run this:

while true; do scrot & sleep 2; done
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wouldn't that take 2 seconds + time scrot takes to run? – Seppo Erviälä Jun 28 '11 at 16:31
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This seems to take a screenshot every 2,5 seconds on my system. I'd like something more precise. – Seppo Erviälä Jun 28 '11 at 16:37
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@Seppo: use while true; do scrot & sleep 2; done. It'll background scrot (it runs scrot, but does not block until scrot is done) – Lekensteyn Jun 28 '11 at 16:50
@Lekensteyn Thanks this is what I needed. – Seppo Erviälä Jun 28 '11 at 18:02
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Thanks Lekensteyn, I edited my answer based on that. I didn't think a few milliseconds would make a difference but it takes 1/2 and would take even longer on a slower disk. Therei0s a risk here that on a very slow disk with a proper 2-second gap, it would be constantly writing to disk or worse still, it would fill up all the buffers until the system ground to a halt. @Seppo make sure whatever you're doing has enough time to write to disk. – Oli♦ Jun 28 '11 at 21:15
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up vote 4 down vote

watch -n2 scrot

or

while true; do scrot -d2; done

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up vote 1 down vote 
while true; do import -window root /path/to/where/you/want/to/save/`date`.png; done
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You will need to install imagemagick for this to work. You can add a sleep command to the script to make it take the screen-shot every 2 seconds, as the question asks. – Javier Rivera Sep 13 '11 at 16:40
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up vote 0 down vote

As per an edit to your question:

import threading
    import os

    def capture(i):
        i += 1
        threading.Timer(2.0, capture, [i]).start()
        fill = str(i).zfill(5)
        os.system("scrot scrot-%s.jpg" % fill)
        os.system("streamer -o streamer-%s.jpeg -s 320x240 -j 100" % fill)

    capture(0)
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up vote -2 down vote

You can use scrot to capture screenshot from command line and setup a cron job to use scrot to take a screenshot every n seconds.

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cron wakes up only once per minute – Seppo Erviälä Jun 28 '11 at 16:24
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cron is not precise enough to do something by seconds (it's accurate to the nearest minute - which is quite a big gap) – Oli♦ Jun 28 '11 at 16:24
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