Passing arguments to a process

The mechanics of passing arguments to a child process can be confusing. Shell environments parse and expand process arguments. For example, a *.txt argument is replaced by a list of filenames matching that pattern, and each of those filenames becomes a separate argument. This recipe talks about how to pass such arguments to child processes correctly.

There are two options to pass arguments to a child process.

Expanding arguments

The first option is to perform the shell argument processing manually.

How to do it...

To manually perform shell processing, follow these steps:

1. Remove shell-specific quoting from arguments, such as the shell command:
   • The ./prog "test directory" shell command becomes cmd:=exec.Command("./prog","test directory").
   • The ./prog dir1 "long dir name" '"quoted name"' Bash command becomes cmd:=exec.Command("./prog", "long dir name", &quot...