A side project I had after I got inspired by the multiple beautiful Neo Tokyo wallpapers I found. Too many of them and not enough time to see them so I just thought,: "Hey, let's use them all!"
You don't need root access to use this script. Put the script anywhere in your home folder. Make it executable:
chmod +x gnome-wallpaper-randomizer.shAdd to your personal cron.
crontab -eSample schedule to change the wallpaper every minute and piping any output to syslog.
*/1 * * * * /home/chad/gnome-background-switcher.sh "/path/to/wallpapers" | systemd-cat -t gnome-wallpaper-randomizer
Caveat: Always test this script in the cron NOT on your user shell as the environments for cron and shell are different.
- Target folder exists and is not empty.
- The contents of the folder are all image types. If there are non-images, it will probably break.
- Random array element picker: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2388488/how-to-select-a-random-item-from-an-array-in-shell
- Nuanced change in Ubuntu 22.04 regarding picture-uri/picture-uri-dark: https://askubuntu.com/questions/66914/how-to-change-desktop-background-from-command-line-in-unity
- Reason why tr is added in the DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS pipeline: https://askubuntu.com/questions/926626/how-do-i-fix-warning-command-substitution-ignored-null-byte-in-input