Redirect stdout pipe of child process in Go

mbert picture mbert · Jan 16, 2012 · Viewed 45.5k times · Source

I'm writing a program in Go that executes a server like program (also Go). Now I want to have the stdout of the child program in my terminal window where I started the parent program. One way to do this is with the cmd.Output() function, but this prints the stdout only after the process has exited. (That's a problem because this server-like program runs for a long time and I want to read the log output)

The variable out is of type io.ReadCloser and I don't know what I should do with it to achieve my task, and I can't find anything helpful on the web on this topic.

func main() {
    cmd := exec.Command("/path/to/my/child/program")
    out, err := cmd.StdoutPipe()
    if err != nil {
        fmt.Println(err)
    }
    err = cmd.Start()
    if err != nil {
        fmt.Println(err)
    }
    //fmt.Println(out)
    cmd.Wait()
} 

Explanation to the code: uncomment the Println function to get the code to compile, I know that Println(out io.ReadCloser) is not a meaningful function.
(it produces the output &{3 |0 <nil> 0} ) These two lines are just required to get the code to compile.

Answer

cmccabe picture cmccabe · Feb 15, 2013

Now I want to have the stdout of the child program in my terminal window where I started the parent program.

No need to mess with pipes or goroutines, this one is easy.

func main() {
    // Replace `ls` (and its arguments) with something more interesting
    cmd := exec.Command("ls", "-l")
    cmd.Stdout = os.Stdout
    cmd.Stderr = os.Stderr
    cmd.Run()
}