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
    Animated 3D Flipping Menu with CSS

    CSS animations aren't just for basic fades or sliding elements anymore -- CSS animations are capable of much more.  I've showed you how you can create an exploding logo (applied with JavaScript, but all animation is CSS), an animated Photo Stack, a sweet...

  • By
    Being a Dev Dad

    I get asked loads of questions every day but I'm always surprised that they're rarely questions about code or even tech -- many of the questions I get are more about non-dev stuff like what my office is like, what software I use, and oftentimes...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Rotate Elements with CSS Transformations

    I've gone on a million rants about the lack of progress with CSS and how I'm happy that both JavaScript and browser-specific CSS have tried to push web design forward. One of those browser-specific CSS properties we love is CSS transformations. CSS transformations...

  • By
    MooTools & Printing – Creating a Links Table of Contents

    One detail we sometimes forget when considering print for websites is that the user cannot see the URLs of links when the page prints. While showing link URLs isn't always important, some websites could greatly benefit from doing so. This tutorial will show you...

Discussion

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