what's the meaning of the command: source /opt/ros/groovy/setup.bash

Question

Hello professors, I am so confused about the tutorial of catkin which told us that we should type the command: source /opt/ros/groovy/setup.bash every time.... I have no idea. because before I type this command, my workspace is under home directory which is /home/username/workspace, but when I type this command and then I type the 'roscd', the path turned to /opt/ros/groovy/.. so my question is where should I create my package? Does that mean every time when I want to create package I should source first? I' so confused about this.. cause when I try to create package and run it, there always be showing some error which told me that command not found....I just follow the tutorials....

Thanks so much for your instruction.

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Originally posted by saina110 on ROS Answers with karma: 107 on 2014-01-29

Post score: 0

Answer 1

These setup.bash files setup your environment variables and paths. When first setting up your workspace, you need to have sourced /opt/ros/distro/setup.bash. After you have a workspace and have run catkin_make, there will be a new setup file found in /devel/setup.bash or, if you ran catkin_make with install, /install/setup.bash. To have your workspace be part of your paths/environment, you need to use these new setup.bash files (which will effectively already include all the paths and environment variables found in the one in /opt/ros since they were part of the environment when you created the workspace)

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Originally posted by fergs with karma: 13902 on 2014-01-29

This answer was ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 1

Answer 2

Well if you dont want to do it everytime then u can just type echo "source /opt/ros/groovy/setup.bash">>~/.bashrc at your terminal. Then ur setup.bash runs everytime u open a new terminal on its own and you dont have to source it everyitme u open a new terminal.

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Originally posted by uzair with karma: 87 on 2014-01-29

This answer was NOT ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 1