Popular:
 Building Resilient Systems on AWS: Learn how to design and implement a resilient, highly available, fault-tolerant infrastructure on AWS.

Set Desktop Wallpaper from Command Line on Mac

By  on  

Whenever I need to accomplish a basic task that typically calls for interacting with a UI, I challenge myself to complete the task from command line. After all, most UIs are simply a mask over basic commands, especially when it comes to the operating system. Suddenly I feel like an automation or systems engineer!

One task I can imagine an IT administrator would need to automate is setting the desktop wallpaper via a script, remotely, or simply by providing the command to do so:

osascript -e 'tell application "Finder" to set desktop picture to POSIX file "/Users/davidwalsh/Downloads/pubg-background.jpg"'

It's important to note that you must provide the absolute path to the image, and not a path that begins with a user path (i.e. ~/Downloads/my-image.jpg)

Beyond the general nerdiness of knowing how to change desktop wallpaper via command line, it could be useful to change your background based on a service being down or other event.

I challenge you to think more like a remote IT administrator or automator when you need to accomplish your next simple task!

Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring

Recent Features

  • By
    CSS Gradients

    With CSS border-radius, I showed you how CSS can bridge the gap between design and development by adding rounded corners to elements.  CSS gradients are another step in that direction.  Now that CSS gradients are supported in Internet Explorer 8+, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome...

  • By
    5 HTML5 APIs You Didn’t Know Existed

    When you say or read "HTML5", you half expect exotic dancers and unicorns to walk into the room to the tune of "I'm Sexy and I Know It."  Can you blame us though?  We watched the fundamental APIs stagnate for so long that a basic feature...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Add Controls to the PHP Calendar

    I showed you how to create a PHP calendar last week. The post was very popular so I wanted to follow it up with another post about how you can add controls to the calendar. After all, you don't want your...

  • By
    Create a Context Menu with Dojo and Dijit

    Context menus, used in the right type of web application, can be invaluable.  They provide shortcut methods to different functionality within the application and, with just a right click, they are readily available.  Dojo's Dijit frameworks provides an easy way to create stylish, flexible context...

Discussion

    Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!