Question

Simple as the title states: Can you use only Java commands to take a screenshot and save it? Or, do I need to use an OS specific program to take the screenshot and then grab it off the clipboard?

Answer 1

Believe it or not, you can actually use java.awt.Robot to ‘create an image containing pixels read from the screen.’ You can then write that image to a file on disk.

I just tried it, and the whole thing ends up like:

Rectangle screenRect = new Rectangle(Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getScreenSize()); BufferedImage capture = new Robot().createScreenCapture(screenRect); ImageIO.write(capture, 'bmp', new File(args[0])); 

NOTE: This will only capture the primary monitor. See GraphicsConfiguration for multi-monitor support.