start and kill rosbag record from bash shell script

Question

Let's say we want to record a rosbag, and run a python script from a bash script.

rosbag record -o /file/name /topic
PID=$!
sleep 2
python ./run_ROS_script.py
kill -INT $PID

so if you leave out -INT it kills the rosbag, but not nicely: it leaves the rosbag in .active status. If you add -INT (same thing as running ctrl+c on the rosbag process) then the rosbag never finishes, and doesn't leave .active status.

So ... what gives? Why can't we nicely kill this rosbag record?

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Originally posted by buckley.toby on ROS Answers with karma: 116 on 2017-11-09

Post score: 5

Answer 1

You could run your rosbag with a Not anonymous node name

rosbag record -o /file/name /topic __name:=my_bag

and then kill it via rosnode kill :

rosnode kill /my_bag

This assures that rosbag stops gracefully.

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Originally posted by Wolf with karma: 7555 on 2017-11-09

This answer was ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 7

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Original comments

Comment by Girmi on 2018-02-16:
The correct command that worked for me (ROS Kinetic) is:

rosbag record -o /file/name /topic __name:=my_bag
rosnode kill /my_bag

Note the double underscore before the name param (see the "Special keys" section at [Remapping Arguments](http://wiki.ros.org/Remapping Arguments))

Comment by gvdhoorn on 2018-02-16:
You're correct. I've just edited the answer by @Wolf.

Comment by stegelid on 2019-08-21:
You can set a trap in your bash script, catching SIGINT and call rosnode kill from there, eg:

#!/bin/bash
trap "rosnode kill /bagger" SIGINT
rosbag record /my_topic __name:=bagger &
roslaunch mypackage launch.launch

Comment by mch on 2021-10-28:\

rosnode kill /my_bag This assures that rosbag stops gracefully.

That does not seem to stop gracefully though. Rosbag name is *.bag.active not just *.bag