Retrieving the GNOME background from the shell

Posted by jodrell@spod.uk.net on 2003-08-01 00:00:00

If you often switch between GNOME and another window manager, for example Blackbox, there's no obvious way to have a common background image that's used for both. However it's not hard to craft together some shell code using gconftool to get the filename of the current GNOME background. Then you can use bsetroot or xset to set your background to the same image that you use in GNOME.

#!/bin/sh
# setroot - a shell script to retrieve the current background from the gconf database and set it
BACKGROUND=`gconftool-2 --get /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename
bsetroot $BACKGROUND