How do you get the output of a system command in Go?

Question

Let's say I want to run 'ls' in a go program, and store the results in a string. There seems to be a few commands to fork processes in the exec and os packages, but they require file arguments for stdout, etc. Is there a way to get the output as a string?

Answer 1

There is an easier way now:

package main  import (     "fmt"     "log"     "os/exec" )  func main() {     out, err := exec.Command("date").Output()     if err != nil {         log.Fatal(err)     }     fmt.Printf("The date is %s\n", out) } 

Where out is the standard output. It's in the format []byte, but you can change it to string easily with:

string(out) 

You can also use CombinedOutput() instead of Output() which returns standard output and standard error.

exec.Command