Toggle the visibility of icons on the OS X Desktop. A reworking of Craig Hockenberry's original: https://gist.github.com/chockenberry/a6a06a73cce44e29808b22d458cafdcb

desktop

#!/bin/bash

# Toggle the visibility of Desktop icons.

# Desktop icons are visible if the CreateDesktop setting is missing or
# if it exists and is set to 1, true, yes, or on (case insensitive).
# Desktop icons are hidden if the CreateDesktop setting exists and
# is set to any value other than 1, true, yes, or on.

# The $icons variable is the value of CreateDesktop if it exists or is
# the empty string if it doesn't.

icons=`defaults read com.apple.finder CreateDesktop 2> /dev/null`

shopt -s nocasematch
case "$icons" in
  "" | "1" | "true" | "yes" | "on" )
    defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop 0 && killall Finder;;
  * )
    defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop 1 && killall Finder;;
esac