How to access command-line arguments passed to a Go program?

Quick Answer:

package main

import ("fmt"
        "os"
)

func main() {
    argsWithProg := os.Args
    argsWithoutProg := os.Args[1:]
    arg := os.Args[3]
    fmt.Println(argsWithProg)
    fmt.Println(argsWithoutProg)
    fmt.Println(arg)
}

Test: $ go run test.go 1 2 3 4 5

Out:

[/tmp/go-build162373819/command-line-arguments/_obj/exe/modbus 1 2 3 4 5]
[1 2 3 4 5]
3

NOTE: os.Args provides access to raw command-line arguments. Note that the first value in this slice is the path to the program, and os.Args[1:] holds the arguments to the program. Reference

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())
}

Command line arguments can be found in os.Args. In most cases though the package flag is better because it does the argument parsing for you.