Question

How would I go about programmatically changing the desktop background in Mac OS X? I’d like to use python, but I’m interested in any way possible. Could I hook up to Terminal and call a certain command?

Answer 1

From python, if you have appscript installed (sudo easy_install appscript), you can simply do

from appscript import app, mactypes app('Finder').desktop_picture.set(mactypes.File('/your/filename.jpg')) 

Otherwise, this applescript will change the desktop background

tell application 'Finder'     set desktop picture to POSIX file '/your/filename.jpg' end tell 

You can run it from the command line using osascript, or from Python using something like

import subprocess  SCRIPT = '''/usr/bin/osascript<<END tell application 'Finder' set desktop picture to POSIX file '%s' end tell END'''  def set_desktop_background(filename):     subprocess.Popen(SCRIPT%filename, shell=True)