Golang walking the directory tree
I used to run into the problem of having to type the full path to reach the project directory I wanted to work on. Everything lives under GOPATH and the paths are usually long. Typing the full path once in a while is fine, but I work with golang daily across several projects. Having to type the full path over and over gets tedious. Sometimes I don’t even know exactly where the project is, or I forget parts of the path, like the author’s name or whether it’s on GitHub or in some other repository.
You can watch the video for this file here.
I used the Walk function from the path/filepath package. The function is simple and takes two parameters: a string with the root directory to start the search from, and a function that gets called for each file or directory found.
The call to Walk looks like this:
err = filepath.Walk(root, visit)
In this example, visit is the function that receives the data for the current item, which can be either a directory or a file.
The function must have the following signature:
func visit(path string, f os.FileInfo, err error) error {
...
return nil
}
The return value varies depending on the behavior you want. Returning nil, for instance, makes Walk move on to the next file or directory. Returning filepath.SkipDir makes it skip the current directory, meaning Walk won’t descend into it. Returning io.EOF makes Walk stop and return to the function that called it. You can also return any other value that implements the error interface.