Drag a Screenshot Using ImageMagick

I learned an interesting trick while working on the Fuji water article. We all know that if you want to take a screenshot in Linux, all you usually have to do is press the “printscreen” button. That, however, takes a screenshot of the entire screen, which you then have to trim down into a useful bit of picture.

The trick I learned to make this easy is to simply type:

import screenshot.png

That will turn your cursor into a little crosshair, which you can drag across a section of the screen.

If you want to do that after a delay, the trick is to use the sleep command like so:

sleep 10; import screenshot.png

I found this tip along with a lot of others on this blog. There are some other interesting techniques there as well.