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The command line utility screencapture claims to be able to capture a single window without requiring interaction, but I can't figure out what to pass it.

-l<windowid> capture this windowsid

It's not the process id of the the application.

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2 Answers

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For some applications you can use AppleScript:

screencapture -l$(osascript -e 'tell app "Safari" to id of window 1') test.png

It doesn't work with Chrome though.

The IDs are also shown in Quartz Debug (available from developer.apple.com/downloads) if you run defaults write com.apple.QuartzDebug QuartzDebugPrivateInterface -bool true.

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Unfortunately, this doesn't work with non-Applescriptable apps like Eclipse or Google Chrome. – CajunLuke Jul 16 '12 at 18:52
Yeah, my target app is not Applescriptable :( But thank you anyway. – Gareth Simpson Jul 16 '12 at 19:13
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Note that window ids are not guaranteed to correspond to the Quartz window id even in applications that are scriptable. – Chris Page Aug 11 '12 at 5:23
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I wrote a little command line utility to retrieve the Window ID for apps that don't support AppleScript. Get it here: https://github.com/smokris/GetWindowID

You can then capture a specific window by specifying its bundle name and window title:

screencapture -l$(./GetWindowID "Vuo Editor" "untitled composition") VuoEditorWindow.png
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