ROS Command-line tools

Common user tools

The following tools are built when a top-level make is called in $ROS_ROOT. They are installed to $ROS_ROOT/bin, which should have been added to your PATH variable as part of the installation process. If this is not the case, please follow the Installation Guide

rosbag

rosbag is a command-line tool for performing various operations on ROS bag files, including playing, recording, and validating.

rosbash

rosbash is not a command, but rather a suite of commands and functionality. It requires that you source the contents of the rosbash file

source $ROS_ROOT/tools/rosbash/rosbash

which, if you followed the installation guide, should already be done by your bashrc file.

rosbash provides the commands roscd and rosed, in addition to adding correct tab-completion functionality to roscd, rosed, rosmake, and rosrun.

roscd

roscd is part of the rosbash suite. It allows you to cd directly to a package, stack, or common location by name rather than having to know the package path.

Usage:

roscd locationname[/subdir]

Example:

roscd roscpp/include

roscd without an argument will take you $ROS_ROOT. In addition to your packages and stacks, there are some common locations, "log", and "test_results" which will take you directly to those locations.

For advanced users, you can extend roscd with your own keywords by modifying the $ROS_LOCATIONS environment variable to contain a colon-separated list of keys and locations that will be included in the roscd path. For example,

export $ROS_LOCATIONS="rospkg=/path/to/rospkg:stairpkg=/path/to/stairpkg"

Prior to ROS-0.8, you could roscd to the first directory on your $ROS_PACKAGE_PATH using the pkg keyword. This functionality can be restored with:

export $ROS_LOCATIONS="pkg=$ROS_PACKAGE_PATH"

rosclean

New in C Turtle

Cleanup filesystem resources (e.g. log files) created by ROS. See rosclean.

roscore

roscore runs the ROS Core Stack (Master, Parameter Server, rosout, etc...).

rosdep

Documented at rosdep, this installs system dependencies

Usage:

rosdep install PACKAGE_NAME

rosed

rosed is part of the rosbash suite. It allows you to directly edit a file within a package by package name rather than having to know the package path.

Usage:

rosed packagename filename

Example:

rosed roscpp ros.h

If the filename is not uniquely defined within the package, a menu will prompt you to choose which of the possible files you want to edit.

rosed will open the editor defined in your $EDITOR environmental variable, or else default to vim.

roscreate-pkg

roscreate-pkg creates common Manifest, CMakeLists, Doxygen and other files necessary for a new ROS package. It is part of the roscreate package.

roscreate-stack

roscreate-stack creates common Stack Manifest, CMakeLists and other files necessary for a new ROS stack. It is part of the roscreate package.

rosrun

rosrun allows you to run an executable in an arbitrary package without having to cd (or roscd) there first.

Usage:

rosrun package executable

Example:

rosrun roscpp_tutorials talker

roslaunch

roslaunch launches a set of nodes from an XML configuration file and includes support for launching on remote machines. More documentation is available on the roslaunch page.

roslocate

Removed in ROS 1.4: this is now part of the rosinstall tool

roslocate finds the repository that a ROS package is stored in, e.g. roslocate svn tf. It makes it easy to quickly checkout the source of a package: svn co `roslocate svn tf`. More documentation is available on the roslocate page.

rosmake

See the rosmake page.

rosmsg

rosmsg displays Message data structure definitions. More documentation is available on the rosmsg page.

rosnode

rosnode displays runtime node information and lets you ping nodes to check connectivity. More documentation is available on the rosnode page.

rospack

See the rospack page.

rosparam

rosparam enables getting and setting parameter server values from the command-line using YAML-encoded text.

rossrv

rossrv displays Service srv data structure definitions. More documentation is available on the rossrv page.

rosservice

rosservice displays run-time information about Services and also lets you print out messages being sent to a topic. More documentation is available on the rosservice page.

rosstack

See the rosstack page.

rostopic

rostopic displays run-time information about Topics and also lets you print out messages being sent to a topic. More documentation is available on the rostopic page.

rosversion

New in Diamondback

Report the version of a ROS stack.

Graphical tools

The ROS graphical tools often require additional dependencies before they can be used, such as graphviz and Python GTK. You can use bash <(rosdep satisfy PACKAGE_NAME) to quickly install the dependencies for these tools.

rxbag

rxbag is a graphical tool for viewing data in ROS bag files.

rxdeps

rxdeps generates a PDF of ROS dependencies.

rxgraph

rxgraph displays an interactive graph of ROS nodes and topics. See the rosgraph package for documentation.

rxplot

rxplot plots numerical data on a ROS topic over time. See the rxtools package for documentation.

Less-used tools

The following tools may be commonly used by internal tools, but aren't often used by end users.

gendeps

See the roslib page

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