"variable declared and not used" compilation error

Question

I am learning Google's new language Go. I am just trying stuff out and I noticed that if you declare a variable and do not do anything with it the go compiler (8g in my case) fails to
compile with this error: hello.go:9: error declared and not used. I was suprised at this since most language compilers just warn you about unused variables but still compile.

Is there anyway I can get around this? I checked the documentation for the compiler and I don't see anything that would change this behaviour. Is there a way to just delete error so that this will compile?

package main

import "fmt"
import "os"

func main()
{
     fmt.Printf("Hello World\n");
     cwd, error := os.Getwd();
     fmt.Printf(cwd);
}

Answer 1

You could try this:

cwd, _ := os.Getwd();

but it seems like it would be better to keep the error like in Jurily's answer so you know if something went wrong.

Answer 2

this can make development a bit of a pain. sometimes i run code that has variables declared but not used (but will be used).

in these cases i simple do this:

fmt.Printf("%v %v %v",somevar1,somevar2,somevar3)

and there, they are "used".

i'd like to see a flag to the go tools that lets me suppress this error while developing.

Answer 3

Does this work?

cwd, error := os.Getwd();
if error == nil {
    fmt.Printf(cwd);
}

Answer 4

You can find out what the error is by importing "fmt" and using

cwd, err := os.Getwd();
if err != nil {
    fmt.Printf("Error from Getwd: %s\n", err)
}

What does it print?