How to Pinpoint the Cause of "Exit Status 1" Error in Golang's exec.Command

When executing the exec.Command method in Golang, receiving an "exit status 1" error can be frustratingly vague. The absence of specific information hinders effective debugging.

To retrieve more detailed information, harness the Stderr property of the Command object. This is achieved by:

var out bytes.Buffer
var stderr bytes.Buffer
cmd.Stdout = &out
cmd.Stderr = &stderr
err := cmd.Run()

By redirecting errors to the stderr buffer, you can access them in the event of a command failure.

if err != nil {
    fmt.Println(fmt.Sprint(err)   ": "   stderr.String())
    return
}

In some cases, the output is displayed in both stdout and stderr. If the command returns a non-zero error code, as in the example below:

cmd := exec.Command("find", "/", "-maxdepth", "1", "-exec", "wc", "-c", "{}", "\\")

The error message will be:

exit status 1: find: -exec: no terminating ";" or " "

It's important to note that although stderr typically indicates errors, some commands print errors in stdout or in stderr without returning an error code. Hence, it might be necessary to adjust your code to accommodate specific commands.