glitchpeg - Man Page

glitchpeg [--display host:display.screen] [--visual visual] [--window] [--root] [--window-id number] [--delay number] [--duration number] [--count number]

Loads an image, corrupts it, and then displays the corrupted version, several times a second. After a while, finds a new image to corrupt.

It glitches the image by altering random bytes in the compressed image file before de-compressing it. This creates interesting visual effects on JPEG files, but doesn't work well on PNG files, since PNG contains checksums that detect simple corruption.

--visual visual

Specify which visual to use.  Legal values are the name of a visual class, or the id number (decimal or hex) of a specific visual.

--window

Draw on a newly-created window.  This is the default.

--root

Draw on the root window.

--window-id number

Draw on the specified window.

--delay number

Per-frame delay, in microseconds.  Default: 30000 (0.03 seconds).

--duration number

How many seconds before loading a new image.  Default: 120.

--count number

Number of glitches to introduce per iteration. Default: 400.

DISPLAY

to get the default host and display number.

XENVIRONMENT

to get the name of a resource file that overrides the global resources stored in the RESOURCE_MANAGER property.

XSCREENSAVER_WINDOW

The window ID to use with --root.

Because this program is feeding intentionally-invalid data into your operating system's image-decoding libraries, it is possible that it may crash as a result of that corrupted data.  

That should not be possible -- but it might be.

Please note that if this happens, that indicates a serious security bug in your system's image libraries!  It likely means that your libraries are susceptible to buffer overflow attacks or similar, which can lead to remote code execution.  You should report that bug to the maintainers of those image libraries.

In the context of xscreensaver, when configured to load only local image files, this should not be a direct security concern: this screen saver crashing will not affect the xscreensaver daemon and will not unlock your screen.

X(1), xscreensaver(1)

Copyright © 2018 by Jamie Zawinski.  Permission to use, copy, modify,  distribute, and sell this software and its documentation for any purpose is  hereby granted without fee, provided that the above copyright notice appear  in all copies and that both that copyright notice and this permission notice appear in supporting documentation.  No representations are made about the  suitability of this software for any purpose.  It is provided "as is" without express or implied warranty.

Jamie Zawinski.