Book Image

Go Systems Programming

Book Image

Go Systems Programming

Overview of this book

Go is the new systems programming language for Linux and Unix systems. It is also the language in which some of the most prominent cloud-level systems have been written, such as Docker. Where C programmers used to rule, Go programmers are in demand to write highly optimized systems programming code. Created by some of the original designers of C and Unix, Go expands the systems programmers toolkit and adds a mature, clear programming language. Traditional system applications become easier to write since pointers are not relevant and garbage collection has taken away the most problematic area for low-level systems code: memory management. This book opens up the world of high-performance Unix system applications to the beginning Go programmer. It does not get stuck on single systems or even system types, but tries to expand the original teachings from Unix system level programming to all types of servers, the cloud, and the web.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

File Input and Output

In the previous chapter, we talked about manipulating files and directories as entities without looking at their contents. However, in this chapter, we will take a different approach and look into the contents of files: you might consider this chapter one of the most important chapters in this book because file input and file output are primary tasks of any operating system.

The main purpose of this chapter is to teach how the Go standard library permits us to open files, read their contents, process them if we like, create new files, and put the desired data into them. There are two main ways to read and write files: using the io package and using the functions of the bufio package. However, both packages work in a comparative way.

This chapter will tell you about the following:

  • Opening files for writing and reading
  • Using the io package for file input and...