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

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

To get both stdout and stderr into separate strings, you can use byte buffers like so:

cmd := exec.Command("date")
var outb, errb bytes.Buffer
cmd.Stdout = &outb
cmd.Stderr = &errb
err := cmd.Run()
if err != nil {
    log.Fatal(err)
}
fmt.Println("out:", outb.String(), "err:", errb.String())

cmd := exec.Command("ls", "-al")
output, _ := cmd.CombinedOutput()
fmt.Println(string(output))

or

cmd := exec.Command(name, arg...)
stdout, err := cmd.StdoutPipe()
cmd.Stderr = cmd.Stdout
if err != nil {
    return err
}
if err = cmd.Start(); err != nil {
    return err
}
for {
    tmp := make([]byte, 1024)
    _, err := stdout.Read(tmp)
    fmt.Print(string(tmp))
    if err != nil {
        break
    }
}

I used this with a recent version of GO (~1.11)

// CmdExec Execute a command
func CmdExec(args ...string) (string, error) {

    baseCmd := args[0]
    cmdArgs := args[1:]

    log.Debugf("Exec: %v", args)

    cmd := exec.Command(baseCmd, cmdArgs...)
    out, err := cmd.Output()
    if err != nil {
        return "", err
    }

    return string(out), nil
}

// Usage:
// out, err := CmdExec("ls", "/home")

Two options, depending on the paradigm you prefer:

1. os.ForkExec()
2. exec.Run()