Scrot

Scrot

Scrot 0.8 taking a screenshot with delay and countdown parameters
Original author(s)	Tom Gilbert
Developer(s)	Tom Gilbert
Initial release	October 26, 2000 (2000-10-26)
Stable release	0.8 / 23 June 2003 (2003-06-23)
Development status	Unmaintained
Written in	C
Operating system	Unix-like
Platform	X Window System
Available in	English
Type	Screen capturing
License	BSD License
Website	www.linuxbrit.co.uk/scrot/

Scrot is a minimalistic command line screen capturing application. It allows substantial degree of flexibility by specifying parameters on command line, including the ability to invoke a third-party utility to manipulate the resulting screenshot.

Description

Features of the program include the ability to limit the scope of capturing to a specific screen area, to set the delay (if needed to capture some menu or another UI element which is shown only when focused) and to specify the filename template using wildcards (including those of the strftime function from the C standard library). Other features include creating thumbnails of the taken screenshots and specifying the quality of the resulting image if lossy format is required.

The scrot utility follows the UNIX philosophy principles formulated by Doug McIlroy: the only thing it does is screen capturing, though it allows one to specify a command for further manipulations of a resulting file.

The ability to control scrot from the command line allows the user to run it over the network with tools like OpenSSH to get a screenshot of a remote desktop or execute it as the window manager command binding.

See also

• GNOME Screenshot
• KSnapshot