Go Spawn & Output Logs From Process

This is a small project to demonstrate how to spawn multiple processes from a Go program and have the Go program write their stdout and stderr lines to a log file.

In this example, we have test and loader Go programs.

The test program outputs a random string from the messages variable each second to stdout. This is just used as a demo program.

The loader program runs the test program five times and outputs their stdout and stderr pipes to a log file in the logs/ directory (e.g. logs/<pid>.log).

Motives

I'm working on a private project which spawns processes from a Go program. However, I wanted to write the stdout and stderr pipes from these spawned processes to a file so I knew what was going on. Since the project utilized Docker which extended build/test time, I decided to write a separate open source program to achieve this goal since I could easily test things.

Building

You may use make via Makefile to build everything easily. Otherwise, you may use go build loader.go and go build test.go to build the Go programs.

Running

Simply run the loader executable to test.

./loader

Note - The remove_logs.sh file is ran on each loader start. This Bash script simply removes all log files in the logs/ directory so we start off from a clean slate and the loader ignores any errors from executing the file.

Credits

• Christian Deacon