First you need Verilator installed, see Installation. In brief, if you installed Verilator using the package manager of your operating system, or did a make install to place Verilator into your default path, you do not need anything special in your environment, and should not have VERILATOR_ROOT set. However, if you installed Verilator from sources and want to run Verilator out of where you compiled Verilator, you need to point to the kit:

    # See above; don't do this if using an OS-distributed Verilator
    export VERILATOR_ROOT=/path/to/where/verilator/was/installed
    export PATH=$VERILATOR_ROOT/bin:$PATH