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by lunarg on May 10th 2016, at 09:52

You can use Terminal in combination with AppleScript to set/change the wallpaper on your Mac. While not immediately obvious when you would need this, it might come in handy for automation purposes.

Open a Terminal and run the following command:

osascript -e 'tell application "Finder" to set desktop wallpaper to POSIX file "/path/to/file.jpg"'

Replace /path/to/file.jpg with the full path of the file you want to use. All common formats (JPG, PNG, etc.) are supported.