| Original author(s) | Tom Gilbert |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Tom Gilbert |
| Initial release | 26 October 2000 |
| Stable release | 0.8 / 23 June 2003 |
| 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.[1]
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The 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 strftime function from the C standard library).[2] The other features include creating the thumbnails of the taken screenshots and specifying the quality of the resulted image if lossy format is required.[3]
The scrot utility follows the UNIX philosophy principles, formulated by Doug McIlroy: the only thing it does is screen capturing, though it allows to specify a command for further manipulations with a resulting file.[4]
The ability to control scrot from command line allows user to run it over the network with the tools like OpenSSH to get a screenshot of remote desktop[5] or execute it as the window manager command binding.[6]
This is how one can send a screenshot of a visual bug to the tech support with a one line command:
$ bugid="#2014244" scrot -cd 10 -s "/tmp/bug ${bugid} %d %B %Y T %R UTC.png" \ -e "echo See the screenshot for the bug report ${bugid} | mutt -s 'Bug ${bugid}' -a '%f' -- support && rm '%f'"
This command would let the user specify a window to capture, wait 10 seconds, capture the selected window, save the file to "bug #2014244 19 March 2012 T 12:58 UTC.png" in "/tmp", send it to the person called support in mutt configuration file and remove it only if sent successfully.
Like most UNIX utilities scrot accepts parameters from command line:[3]