Make a note that the capitalization of these flags matters, if you use a lowercase -t, you’ll be trying to specify a file type for the screenshot instead, like so: Specify a Screen Shot File Type with screen capture from Command Line The -T flag needs to be followed by whatever amount in seconds you want to delay the screen shot by, in that example, it’s 10 seconds which is also Grabs default. You can also specify a timed screenshot from the Terminal: One of the better features of the Grab utility is that it lets you take screenshots on a timer, so you can setup an app or situation on the screen and capture things like alert boxes, menus, button actions, etc. Take a Screenshot on a Timer from Command Line Now that it’s in your clipboard you can just paste it into Preview, Photoshop, Pages, or whatever else you want to use. If you want to send the screenshot to your clipboard rather than to a file, attach the -c flag, but don’t assign a file name or path: Screencapture ~/Desktop/screenshot.jpg Send the Screen Shot to the Clipboard via Command Line You can always specify another location just by choosing a path for the screenshot, here’s the Desktop: That is the most basic format of the command, it’ll take a screenshot of your entire screen and name it ‘test.jpg’ in the current working Terminal directory, which is typically your user home.

The Basics: Taking a Screen Shot from the Terminal in Mac OS Xįirst up, launch the Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/) and then type the following: Here is a detailed overview of this utility and how to use it, which allows capturing screenshots from the command line with ease.

Mac screenshot command