Book Image

Mastering Go – Third Edition - Third Edition

By : Mihalis Tsoukalos
5 (2)
Book Image

Mastering Go – Third Edition - Third Edition

5 (2)
By: Mihalis Tsoukalos

Overview of this book

Mastering Go is the essential guide to putting Go to work on real production systems. This freshly updated third edition includes topics like creating RESTful servers and clients, understanding Go generics, and developing gRPC servers and clients. Mastering Go was written for programmers who want to explore the capabilities of Go in practice. As you work your way through the chapters, you’ll gain confidence and a deep understanding of advanced Go concepts, including concurrency and the operation of the Go Garbage Collector, using Go with Docker, writing powerful command-line utilities, working with JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) data, and interacting with databases. You’ll also improve your understanding of Go internals to optimize Go code and use data types and data structures in new and unexpected ways. This essential Go programming book will also take you through the nuances and idioms of Go with exercises and resources to fully embed your newly acquired knowledge. With the help of Mastering Go, you’ll become an expert Go programmer by building Go systems and implementing advanced Go techniques in your projects.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
14
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15
Index

Developing the which(1) utility in Go

Go can work with your operating system through a set of packages. A good way of learning a new programming language is by trying to implement simple versions of traditional UNIX utilities. In this section, you'll see a Go version of the which(1) utility, which will help you understand the way Go interacts with the underlying OS and reads environment variables.

The presented code, which will implement the functionality of which(1), can be divided into three logical parts. The first part is about reading the input argument, which is the name of the executable file that the utility will be searching for. The second part is about reading the PATH environment variable, splitting it, and iterating over the directories of the PATH variable. The third part is about looking for the desired binary file in these directories and determining whether it can be found or not, whether it is a regular file, and whether it is an executable file. If the...