Determine path of (sourced) catkin workspace?

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I was actually looking a solution that doesn't require further processing, because I need access to the path in several places (scripts) and I would like to avoid repeatedly implementing the disassembling the list of paths and navigating to the root.

You could parse it once in a bash script or in the .bashrc and export an environment variable (e.g. SOURCED_WS) when you find the path you are looking for. That way, you would have to process it only once. Could this idea be of any use? :)

I cannot rely on modifying .bashrc (must work for many users / different ws, and on CI systems). My goal was to have something that is defined exactly when setup.sh gets sourced. Surprising that catkin lacks this basic feature... Maybe an env-hook could do it, but the documentation is poor.

CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH is the variable to use. It's a standard linux env var with paths in it, separated by colons (:). First path is of the last sourced workspace. You'll have to write a short bash script (or even a Python script) that parses it. I don't see any other way.

@gvdhoorn It's not possible to reliably extract the path from CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH: (1) as you say, it is a standard linux variable, so making the assumption that the first path is the workspace can be wrong; (2) the path points to the devel space and afaik it can be arbitrarily nested, right?