Telling a UNIX System What to Do

This chapter teaches you about systems programming in Go. Systems programming involves working with files and directories, process control, signal handling, network programming, system files, configuration files, and file input and output (I/O). If you recall from Chapter 1, A Quick Introduction to Go, the reason for writing system utilities with Linux in mind is that often Go software is executed in a Docker environment—Docker images use the Linux operating system, which means that you might need to develop your utilities with the Linux operating system in mind. However, as Go code is portable, most system utilities work on Windows machines without any changes or with minor modifications. Among other things, this chapter implements two utilities, one that finds cycles in UNIX file systems and another that converts JSON data to XML data and vice versa. Additionally, in this chapter we are going to improve the phone book application with...