Take a screen shot from command line in Windows

This question's already been answered, but I thought I'd throw this in as well. NirCmd (freeware, sadly, not open source) can take screenshots from the command line, in conjunction with the numerous other functions it can do.

Running this from the command line either in nircmd.exe's directory or if you copied it to your system32 folder:

nircmd.exe savescreenshot screen1.png

does what you want. You can also delay it like this:

nircmd.exe cmdwait 2000 savescreenshot screen1.png

That will wait 2000 milliseconds (2 seconds), and then capture and save the screenshot.


Download imagemagick. Many command line image manipulation tools are included. import allows you to capture some or all of a screen and save the image to a file. For example, to save the entire screen as a jpeg:

import -window root screen.jpeg

If you want to use the mouse to click inside a window or select a screen region & save a a png, just use:

import box.png

it can be done without external tools (you just need installed .net framework ,which is installed by default on everything from vista and above) - screenCapture.bat. It is a selfcompiled C# program and you can save the output in few formats and capture only the active window or the whole screen:

screenCapture- captures the screen or the active window and saves it to a file
Usage:
screenCapture  filename.format [WindowTitle]

filename - the file where the screen capture will be saved
format - Bmp,Emf,Exif,Gif,Icon,Jpeg,Png,Tiff and are supported - default is bmp
WindowTitle - instead of capturing the whole screen will capture the only a window with the given title if there's such

Examples:

call screenCapture notepad.jpg "Notepad"
call screenCapture screen.png