How to Create Screenshots via CLI with scrot

scrot is a commandline screen capture util like "import", but using imlib2.

It has lots of options for autogenerating filenames, and can do fun stuff like taking screenshots of multiple displays and glueing them together.

Install Scrot in Ubuntu

sudo aptitude install scrot

This will complete the installation.

Using Scrot

Example scrot commands
1. Capture screen and save file to working directory:

scrot

2. Capture screen in 5 seconds time:

scrot -d 5

3. Capture screen in 5 seconds time, name file with time stamp and screen dimensions:

scrot -d 5 '%Y-%m-%d--%s_$wx$h_scrot.png'

4. As above, but move file into "images" directory and open the image with GIMP:

scrot -d 5 '%Y-%m-%d--%s_$wx$h_scrot.png' -e 'mv $f ~/images/ & gimp ~/images/$f'

scrot Options
See below for a full list of options:

Usage : scrot [OPTIONS]... [FILE]
Where FILE is the target file for the screenshot.
If FILE is not specified, a date-stamped file will be dropped in the
current directory.
See man scrot for more details
-h, --help display this help and exit
-v, --version output version information and exit
-b, --border When selecting a window, grab wm border too
-c, --count show a countdown before taking the shot
-d, --delay NUM wait NUM seconds before taking a shot
-e, --exec APP run APP on the resulting screenshot
-q, --quality NUM Image quality (1-100) high value means
high size, low compression. Default: 75.
For lossless compression formats, like png,
low quality means high compression.
-m, --multidisp For multiple heads, grab shot from each
and join them together.
-s, --select interactively choose a window or rectangle
with the mouse
-t, --thumb NUM generate thumbnail too. NUM is the percentage
of the original size for the thumbnail to be,
or the geometry in percent, e.g. 50x60 or 80x20.

SPECIAL STRINGS
Both the --exec and filename parameters can take format specifiers
that are expanded by scrot when encountered.
There are two types of format specifier. Characters preceded by a '%'
are interpreted by strftime(2). See man strftime for examples.
These options may be used to refer to the current date and time.
The second kind are internal to scrot and are prefixed by '$'
The following specifiers are recognised:
$f image path/filename (ignored when used in the filename)
$m thumbnail path/filename
$n image name (ignored when used in the filename)
$s image size (bytes) (ignored when used in the filename)
$p image pixel size
$w image width
$h image height
$t image format
$$ prints a literal '$'
n prints a newline (ignored when used in the filename)
Example:
scrot '%Y-%m-%d_$wx$h_scrot.png' -e 'mv $f ~/images/shots/'
Creates a file called something like 2000-10-30_2560x1024_scrot.png
and moves it to your images directory.

This program is free software see the file COPYING for licensing info.
Copyright Tom Gilbert 2000

Source from here