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scrot

A simple X11 command-line screenshot utility.

scrot is a simple X11 command-line screenshot utility. It captures the X11 screen, a region (interactively with --select), or a window from the command line and saves the result as a PNG, JPEG, or other format. Post-capture commands let you pipe the screenshot through external programs — for example, immediately uploading it to a server or copying it to the clipboard.

Tom Gilbert wrote scrot in 2000 as a tiny "do one thing well" screenshot tool, and it has been kept alive by the resurrecting-open-source-projects organisation on GitHub since the original development tailed off. The codebase is small and the binary fits comfortably in tiling-WM setups.

scrot is commonly used in scripts and keybindings on lightweight tiling-WM setups (i3, dwm, bspwm) where the desktop environment does not provide a screenshot tool. On Wayland, grim plays the same role; both are typically wrapped in a small shell script that handles annotation, clipboard, and upload.

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install scrot
Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install scrot
Arch:          sudo pacman -S scrot