golang os.Create cause "no such file or directory" error

Question

Must be something simple, but I cannot seem to figure out. I keep getting "no such file or directory" error. Thought the Create function is to create a new file?

package main

import (
    "log"
    "os"
)

func main() {
    f, err := os.Create("~/golang-server.log")
    defer f.Close()
    if err != nil {
        panic(err.Error())
    }
    log.SetOutput(f)
}

Answer 1

You can't use ~ or environment variable like $HOME to specify the file path, they're string literal and means actual path. The error you got is because it treat ~/golang-server.log as a relative path of current directory, and there's no directory ~ in current directory.

With manually created sub-directory ~, your code will succeed:

 ~/test/ mkdir \~
 ~/test/ go run t.go
 ~/test/ ls \~
golang-server.log

So need to pass an absolute path or relative path to os.Create.