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> [package name]/ [message type] Subcommands: show, type, and list
rosservice	This displays the runtime information about various services and allows the display of messages being sent to a topic	$ rosservice <subcommand> [service name] Subcommands: args, call, find, info, list, and type
rosparam	This is used to get and set parameters (data) used by nodes	$ rosparam <subcommand> [parameter] Subcommands: get, set, list, and delete

The website (http://wiki.ros.org/ROS/CommandLineTools) describes many ROS commands. The table lists some important ones. However, these examples only cover a few of the possible variations of the commands.