rospack

rospack is a command-line tool used within the Robot Operating System (ROS) environment. Its primary function is to provide information about ROS packages. This includes finding the locations of installed packages, listing their dependencies, and retrieving other metadata. The tool operates by querying the ROS package path, which is an environment variable that tells ROS where to look for packages.

Key commands available with rospack include rospack find, which returns the absolute path to a specified package. Another common usage is rospack list, which enumerates all available ROS packages. rospack depends-on can be used to see which other packages rely on a particular package, and rospack depends-on-transitive shows all direct and indirect dependencies. Understanding and utilizing rospack is fundamental for navigating and managing ROS projects, as it allows developers to quickly locate necessary package resources and understand package relationships.