It took me forever to figure out, but I finally have working pipe menus in Openbox. For some reason every script I wrote failed utterly, and to be honest, I still am not 100 percent sure why.
However, my original goal of setting the wallpaper with a pipe menu works now, thanks to a thread on the Gentoo forums that has a sample that’s easily modified. (Note that the script uses gawk to trim the file name to an acceptable size; I had to download it for my Ubuntu machine. Arch had installed it already.)
I also commandeered the script to trigger my xscreensaver-wallpaper gimmick. Check my Arch blog for details on that. 
My only points to suggest are to
- make sure the script file is executable 🙄
- make sure the output is acceptable to Openbox (apparently item labels can’t have certain characters in them)
- and make sure the syntax is clean
As far as I can tell, my worst problems stemmed from those issues, or a combination. Once I had a clean script that Openbox liked, it worked fine.
