Summary#

I’ve been working on improving my setup for development and personal use. I’ve began to ever so slowly do this over the course of a couple of months and I’m starting to enjoy the tiling window manager Sway.

Sway is simple to use and setup; with it being similar to i3 window manager. Which makes it perfect considering that I’ve come to warm up to Wayland overall.

But, with that comes a very minor issue that I just solved today. I tend to enjoy having a different background every other startup or reload as a personal preference. I also needed to dust off some of my Python chops. I haven’t written anything in Python in probably a month. So, this seemed to be a good reason to write something for it.

The script is pretty simple. So, if anyone would rather just read it. Then below is the path to the script.

I think that settles the introductions. Now on to the script and the solution.

Scripted Solution#

A bulk of the work performed by the script is a function named randomFile() which ingests a directory path.

It will check to make sure the base path exists and is a directory.

Create an empty list and add every absolute path to all of the files in the directory if it’s a file.

Then it will use the random.choice() method to provide a random file.

def randomFile(dir_path):
    """Outputs the full path of a random file in specified directory"""
    if not os.path.exists(dir_path):
        sys.exit("path does not exist")
    if not os.path.isdir(dir_path):
        sys.exit("input is not a directory")

    file_paths = []

    for file in os.listdir(dir_path):
        abs_path = os.path.join(dir_path, file)
        if os.path.isfile(abs_path):
            file_paths.append(abs_path)

    return random.choice(file_paths)

That is a gist of what it does. Couple that with some argument handling and a print statement to output the path and we’re done. I’ll be updating this regualrly as I see better ways to improve it.

if __name__ == "__main__":
    args = sys.argv
    arg_count = len(args)

    if arg_count == 0:
        print ("randomfile")
        print ("usage: randomfile [dirpath]")

    if arg_count > 2:
        sys.exit("more then one argument was provided")

    path = args[1]

    random_path = randomFile(path)

    print (f"{random_path}")

Problem Solved#

In the configuration file for the Sway there is a section for setting the background on all displays. This part of the configuration can take the output from bash command substitution; e.g. $(). So it can run the script no problem. So I updated the following line.

This will run the script from the .config/wallpaper/ path and output the choice the script provides.

output * bg $(~/.local/scripts/python/randfile/randfile ~/.config/wallpaper/) fill