How do I change the desktop background from command line?

Question

How can I change my desktop background from command line?

See the thread Changin desktop background from the command line. — N.N., Jun 22 '11 at 12:18
possible duplicate of How to change desktop background from command line in Unity? — Aditya, Nov 22 '13 at 10:11

score 11 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 12 '20 at 14:37

11

Edit: In later versions of Ubuntu (this question was written in 2011, after all), things moved to gsettings. See: How to change desktop background from command line in Unity?

It's a gconf setting: /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename. You can set its value by running the following:

gconftool-2 -t string -s /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename <path>

Obviously, replace <path> with a full path to the background image you want to display.

If you want to see what else is available from a nice GUI, run:

gconf-editor /desktop/gnome/background/

edited Jun 12 '20 at 14:37

Community

answered Jun 22 '11 at 12:16

Oli

2

I did this with gconf-editor but nothing changed. I'm assuming it will when I restart things, but I'd rather not have to close everything to try out a new background. Is there a way to get it to refresh immediately? – MalcolmOcean Feb 27 '13 at 01:18