ROS Robotics By Example

ROS commands summary

If you are communicating with ROS via the terminal window, it is possible to issue commands to ROS to explore or control nodes in a package from the command prompt, as listed in the following table:

Command	Action	Example usage and subcommand examples
roscore	This starts the Master	$ roscore
rosrun	This runs an executable program and creates nodes	$ rosrun [package name] [executable name]
rosnode	This shows information about nodes and lists the active nodes	$ rosnode info [node name] $ rosnode <subcommand> Subcommand: list
rostopic	This shows information about ROS topics	$ rostopic <subcommand> <topic name> Subcommands: echo, info, and type
rosmsg	This shows information about the message types	$ rosmsg <subcommand> ...