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Golang program to check specified shell command exists or not

Here, we are going to learn how to check specified shell command exists or not in Golang (Go Language)?
Submitted by Nidhi, on May 30, 2021 [Last updated : March 05, 2023]

Checking a specified shell command exists or not in Golang

Problem Solution:

Here, we will check specified shell command is exist or not using exec.LookPath() function.

Program/Source Code:

The source code to check specified shell command exists or not is given below. The given program is compiled and executed on the ubuntu 18.04 operating system successfully.

Golang code to check specified shell command exists or not

// Golang program to check given
// shell command exists or not?

package main

import "os/exec"
import "fmt"

func main() {
	_, err1 := exec.LookPath("lss")
	if err1 != nil {
		fmt.Println("lss Command does not exist")
	} else {
		fmt.Println("lss Command exists")
	}

	_, err2 := exec.LookPath("ls")
	if err2 != nil {
		fmt.Println("ls Command does not exist")
	} else {
		fmt.Println("ls Command exists")
	}
}

Output:

lss Command does not exist
ls Command exists

Explanation:

In the above program, we declare the package main. The main package is used to tell the Go language compiler that the package must be compiled and produced the executable file. Here, we imported the required packages to predefined functions.

In the main() function, we checked the specified command is exist or not using exec.LookPath() function. The exec.LookPath() function returns error, if  specified command is not exist. And, we printed appropriate messages based on specified shell command on the console screen.

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