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
    An Interview with Eric Meyer

    Your early CSS books were instrumental in pushing my love for front end technologies. What was it about CSS that you fell in love with and drove you to write about it? At first blush, it was the simplicity of it as compared to the table-and-spacer...

  • By
    Create Namespaced Classes with MooTools

    MooTools has always gotten a bit of grief for not inherently using and standardizing namespaced-based JavaScript classes like the Dojo Toolkit does.  Many developers create their classes as globals which is generally frowned up.  I mostly disagree with that stance, but each to their own.  In any event...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    MooTools 1.2 Image Protector: dwProtector

    Image protection is a hot topic on the net these days, and why shouldn't it be? If you spent two hours designing an awesome graphic, would you want it ripped of in matter of seconds? Hell no! That's why I've created an image...

  • By
    CSS Sprites

    The idea of CSS sprites is pretty genius. For those of you who don't know the idea of a sprite, a sprite is basically multiple graphics compiled into one image. The advantages of using sprites are: Fewer images for the browser to download, which means...

Discussion

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