Over the years, I’ve collected a pretty substantial collection of cool-looking wallpaper pictures. Most operating systems have a way of automatically choosing one at random whenever you log in. Sadly, my particular version of Ubuntu doesn’t have this feature. So I’ve had to resort to creating a script and adding that script to a Cron job. Shocking.
The script itself is straightforward. First, it creates a variable for the location of the wallpapers:
WALLPAPER_DIR="/home/johnny/Pictures/Wallpaper"
Then the script creates a new variable called RANDOM_PICTURE that is just the filename of a random image in the WALLPAPER_DIR directory:
RANDOM_PICTURE=$(ls $WALLPAPER_DIR -1 | shuf -n 1)
Lastly, the script takes those two variables and sets the org.gnome.desktop.background object as a picture-uri:
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background picture-uri "file://$WALLPAPER_DIR/$RANDOM_PICTURE"
So the whole script looks like this:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
WALLPAPER_DIR="/home/johnny/Pictures/Wallpaper"
RANDOM_PICTURE=$(ls $WALLPAPER_DIR -1 | shuf -n 1)
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background picture-uri "file://$WALLPAPER_DIR/$RANDOM_PICTURE"
All that’s left is to save this script somewhere, make it executable, and add it to a Cron job. To set a Cron job, open the Cron table with crontab -e and create a new line:
15 10 * * * /home/johnny/Apps/random-wallpaper.sh
The line above sets a Cron job to run the random-wallpaper.sh script every day at 10:15. Lovely stuff.
