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

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())

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")

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
    }
}

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