Whether you ’re remotely trying to help oneself a acquaintance troubleshoot their scheme or putting together a education document for your office , sometimes you might take to take a picture of your screen . Mac OS X has some splendid screenshot tools available , both built - in and third - party . In cause you ’re not familiar , or if you just need a brief refresher course , here ’s a summary :
However , none of these tools will help you get sure screenshots , such as this one :
That ’s a guessing of the login window ( in Fast User Switching mode ) and a seemingly insufferable picture to take . So how ’d I do it ? The answer is dim-witted , though it does ask a 2d Mac with the ability to reach the first Mac over a web .
OS X includes a squeamish command - descent screen capture service program named , simply enough , screencapture . While there ’s not a ton of software documentation on this political platform , man screencapturewill give you the canonic options . Once you ’ve usedsshto connect to the Mac whose screen you care to capture , you necessitate to accomplish thescreencapturecommand with root privileges . you’re able to also specify some of the program line seam arguments , as shown in themanpage . For instance , here ’s how I captured the login window :
The first blood just switches me to the Desktop folder of the substance abuser that I logged into viassh . The 2nd line of merchandise actually lead the screenshot ; I ’ve used - ttiffto coif the eccentric to TIFF ( -tis the ‘ set type ’ option , andtiffis the case , with no added space ! ) , and then limit the name for the file . If you do n’t want to get wind the camera - clicking sound on the remote Mac , use the - xoption .
That ’s really all there is to it — other than actualise that the picture you just took is saved on the second Mac , not the target one . To get your pic over to the source Mac , which is probably where you need it , you’re able to usescp , a impregnable transcript programme . After you disconnect from the remote Mac , just use something like this to copy the screenshot across :
For model , in my vitrine , I used this mastery :
You might think this john is only useful for grabbing login window screenshots , but that ’s not the case . It could also be used in a game that locks out the keyboard shortcuts — start the game , sshin from another Mac , and then seize the screenshot when you reach the spot in the biz that you ’d care to capture . Another opening is for checking on a distant Mac that you have run some big task — a computer backup or a immense download , for instance . Yes , there are GUI way of connecting and watching the screen , but you might discover it faster to usesshto connect , grab a screenshot , and then copy it back withscpto see on the button where the Mac is at in the physical process .
