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Hello all,
I know this is really noob question but here it goes.
I saw (while studying the tutorials) that I need to source the devel/setup.bash at every new shell. I would like to ask, what exactly does that mean? I need to source the setup.bash file with every new terminal? If not, then how oftern?
Yes, with every new shell/terminal that is opened, I need to source my file. (terminal = shell ... in some way).
So how can this become automatically? The answer that @SAI KISHOR KOTHAKOTA was correct. But because I am a noob, it took me some time and research to find out what exactly he meant and what I needed to do. So I will write down here, in a step-by-step way, how I did it and then some explanation.
STEPS:
Explanation:
So, from what I know, the .bashrc file runs automatically for every new shell you open. So now, every time you open a shell, all of those command run plus the new command you added (the source command).
Tnx again to @SAI KISHOR KOTHAKOTA :)
Thanks for this helpful explanation. It wasn't explained clearly in my Gentle Introduction to ROS book, which just says you need to source setup.bash once in each terminal (which frankly isn't all that clear: you don't need to do it in your roscore terminal, for instance).
@askkvn I found out that this is a question related to how Linux works then ROS. When ever you open a new shell (that is a new terminal window) it will look only is some specific parts of your whole file system for commands. In other words, if you write the command "cd" it will look in some pre-defined locations to find if that is an actual command. Now, if you want to add new commands to your shell you need to tell it where to find them. This is basically what the file devel/setup.bash. So, when you source this, the file will tell the shell where to find all the ROS executable (including the programs that you have compiled). That is basically the need for it, at least to my understanding. Hope it helps. :)
hmm everytime when you want to use the catkin workspace and the best option is to place it in .bashrc
just open .bashrc and in the bottom you will find
source /opt/ros/indigo/setup.bash
below that just place the below line then that's it no need to do anymore:
source ~/catkin_ws/devel/setup.bash
Every time when you establish a new workspace, you need to source the setup.bash as the followings:
Yes, you need to source setup.bash every time you start a new shell and want to use ROS commands.
The "source" command runs the setup.bash script and copies any environment variables that setup.bash sets in its own environment into the environment of the shell where you ran the source command.
If you want to see what setup.bash is actually setting, do the following:
$ export COLCON_TRACE=1
Then when you do: "source setup.bash" it will display what it's actually doing, as it does it.
As mentioned in the other answer, it's easy to just add the source command to the end of your .bashrc file, which is run every time you start a new shell. More on that below.
By the way, source is also aliased to ".", so you can do this and it will have the same effect:
$ . setup.bash
The .bashrc file is located in your home directory. In Unix-derived systems like Linux and Ubuntu, your home directory is usually at the path /home/username, so you'll find .bashrc here:
$ ls -l /home/yourusername/.bashrc
The tilde character (~) is a standard abbreviation or alias for your home directory, so you can just write:
$ ls ~/.bashrc
Note that files prefixed with a period do not normally show up with the "ls" command, you have to either use the filename with ls or use "ls -a"
Asked: 2015-04-08 09:35:34 -0500
Seen: 52,192 times
Last updated: May 23 '22
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