I am very new to Perl and this is the first program I've written that I consider to be useful.

The program selects a random image to be used as a background for IceWM by editing the relevant line in ~/.icewm/preferences. It then checks to see if IceWM is running. If it is, it restarts icewmbg. If it is not, it starts icewm-session.

I've edited my .xinitrc file to call this program on startx and I have also added "F2 = icewmRandombg" to my ~/.icewm/keys file so pressing F2 gives me a new background.

I'm fairly certain the second chdir command isn't necessary, but I'm not absolutely certain, and it's not hurting anything, so I left it. I put it there so icewm-session would be called from my home directory.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

# This program edits ~/.icewm/preferences to set a random wallpaper.
# It then checks to see if IceWM is running.  If it is, it restarts
# icewmbg. If it isn't it starts icewm-session.



use strict;

my $image_directory = "/home/jivy/media/images/wallpaper";
my @image_files = glob "$image_directory/*";

my $wallpaper = $image_files[rand @image_files];

chdir "/home/jivy/.icewm" or die "Cannot change to .icewm: ($!)";

my $pref = "preferences";
my $new_pref = "preferences.tmp";
my $bak = "preferences.bak";


open PREF, "< $pref";
open NEW_PREF, ">> $new_pref";

while (<PREF>) {
    s#$image_directory/.*#$wallpaper"#;
    print NEW_PREF $_;
}

close PREF;
close NEW_PREF;

rename ($pref,$bak);
rename($new_pref,$pref);

chdir "/home/jivy" or die "Cannot change to jivy: ($!)";

if (`ps -e | grep icewm-session`) {
    exec "icewmbg -r";
    } else {
    exec "icewm-session";
}

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In reply to Random Desktop Background for IceWM by Texadan

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