How to access command-line arguments passed to a Go program?
How do I access command-line arguments in Go? They're not passed as arguments to main
.
A complete program, possibly created by linking multiple packages, must have one package called main, with a function
func main() { ... }
defined. The function main.main() takes no arguments and returns no value.
You can access the command-line arguments using the os.Args
variable. For example,
package main
import (
"fmt"
"os"
)
func main() {
fmt.Println(len(os.Args), os.Args)
}
You can also use the flag package, which implements command-line flag parsing.
Flag is a good package for that.
package main
// Go provides a `flag` package supporting basic
// command-line flag parsing. We'll use this package to
// implement our example command-line program.
import "flag"
import "fmt"
func main() {
// Basic flag declarations are available for string,
// integer, and boolean options. Here we declare a
// string flag `word` with a default value `"foo"`
// and a short description. This `flag.String` function
// returns a string pointer (not a string value);
// we'll see how to use this pointer below.
wordPtr := flag.String("word", "foo", "a string")
// This declares `numb` and `fork` flags, using a
// similar approach to the `word` flag.
numbPtr := flag.Int("numb", 42, "an int")
boolPtr := flag.Bool("fork", false, "a bool")
// It's also possible to declare an option that uses an
// existing var declared elsewhere in the program.
// Note that we need to pass in a pointer to the flag
// declaration function.
var svar string
flag.StringVar(&svar, "svar", "bar", "a string var")
// Once all flags are declared, call `flag.Parse()`
// to execute the command-line parsing.
flag.Parse()
// Here we'll just dump out the parsed options and
// any trailing positional arguments. Note that we
// need to dereference the pointers with e.g. `*wordPtr`
// to get the actual option values.
fmt.Println("word:", *wordPtr)
fmt.Println("numb:", *numbPtr)
fmt.Println("fork:", *boolPtr)
fmt.Println("svar:", svar)
fmt.Println("tail:", flag.Args())
}