Although the design follows Unix standards, it provides a platform-independent interface to any operating system functionality. The os package provides an API interface for file handling which is uniform across all operating systems. There are several packages involved in this process. The built-in library of Go offers excellent support to perform file-related operations, such as creating a file, read/write operations, file rename or move, copy, getting metadata information of the file, and so forth. The library provides all that is required for file handling. However, Go programmers, in most cases, do not have to deal with issues at such a low level (but we can actually manipulate paths in Go if need be). The API design of the programming language must be consistent and provide a uniform interface to the programmer, irrespective of the differences in the file system structure of the underlying platform. Other systems may use different characters.

For example, porting file paths between Windows and Unix-like systems is tricky one uses backslash and other slash characters as separators. Dealing with filesystems is complex because modern operating systems provide file stores that map filenames to sequences of bytes and the representation may vary across various platforms. Using a Go library, we can access the persistent storage of a computer or server and deal with the file system architecture of the underlying operating system. Here we introduce the basic idea of file handling mechanisms and how to implement them in the Golang programming language. In Go, the API for file handling is well-knitted into the standard architecture of the language and provides extensive support for it. All general-purpose programming languages provide these facilities through various libraries. Programmatically handling a file essentially means working with it, such as getting metadata information, creating new files, or reading and writing data to and from a file format into a program’s internal data structure. Typically, main memory (or RAM) is used for temporary storage and hard disk, tape, and so on. Data can be stored in a file, which provides some form of a structure to the data and allows it to be stored permanently or temporarily depending upon the storage medium.

Golang write to file