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
    9 Mind-Blowing Canvas Demos

    The <canvas> element has been a revelation for the visual experts among our ranks.  Canvas provides the means for incredible and efficient animations with the added bonus of no Flash; these developers can flash their awesome JavaScript skills instead.  Here are nine unbelievable canvas demos that...

  • By
    Creating Scrolling Parallax Effects with CSS

    Introduction For quite a long time now websites with the so called "parallax" effect have been really popular. In case you have not heard of this effect, it basically includes different layers of images that are moving in different directions or with different speed. This leads to a...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    MooTools Gone Wild: Element Flashing

    If you're like me and lay awake in bed at night, you've flipped on the TV and seen the commercials: misguided, attention-starved college girls fueled by alcohol ruining their futures by flashing lame camera-men on Spring Break. Why do they do it? Attention...

  • By
    Introducing MooTools LinkAlert

    One of my favorite Firefox plugins is called LinkAlert. LinkAlert shows the user an icon when they hover over a special link, like a link to a Microsoft Word DOC or a PDF file. I love that warning because I hate the surprise...

Discussion

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