Exec command giving error "No such file or directory" when I try to execute the below code on cmd in golang with exec. Can someone help me with this?

Ritesh kumar 0
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"No such file or directory" when I try to execute the below code on cmd in golang with exec. This is basically because of the white spaces in this path ->

/Users/ltuser/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome Beta/Default

How do i escape the white spaces when executing with exec command in golang cmd in macos?

        cmdStr := fmt.Sprintf("find /Users/ltuser/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome Beta/Default -mindepth 1 ! -name Preferences -delete")
        args := strings.Fields(cmdStr)
        cmd := exec.Command(args[0], args[1:]...)
        op, err := cmd.CombinedOutput()
        if err != nil {
            fmt.Println("error",err.Error())
        }
goland go macos
1 Answers

How do i escape the white spaces when executing with exec command in golang cmd in macos?

"find /Users/ltuser/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome Beta/Default -mindepth 1 ! -name Preferences -delete"

It's important to distinguish between exec.Command and a shell statement. When you're running things at "the command line", you're running them in a shell. This lets you create pipelines with |, redirect with <, >, etc, use variables, and so on. It has a specific syntax for executing executables in the $PATH such as find. In shell syntax, a sequence of characters executable arg1 arg2 arg3 will be parsed around the spaces. executable, if a program found in the path, will be executed with exec. The arguments, split by spaces, will become the arguments to exec.

That's why when you run a command like your find at the shell, strings like /Users/ltuser/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome Beta/Default must be enquoted if they're to be passed as one argument.

But you're not running this at the shell, even though you expressed your command as a sequence of string-separated values. That's why you

        args := strings.Fields(cmdStr)

That's where your path with spaces becomes multiple arguments.

exec.Command has an interface like the OS exec, because that's what it uses to execute your commands for you. And that's why it takes a list of strings; no parsing need be done, and no characters in the strings need to be escaped.

So just split up the arguments in the code, and pass them straight into exec.Command:

cmd := exec.Command("find", 
   "/Users/ltuser/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome Beta/Default", 
   "-mindepth",
    ... ... ...,
)
erik2580
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