Golang : How to get own program name during runtime ?

One of the common question asked by newbie to Golang is how does one get their own program name during runtime. Getting the name right can be useful for task like checking how many processes with the same name already running in memory, passing additional arguments to own program depending on the Operating System Environment variables and many other reasons.

From Golang's http://golang.org/pkg/os/#pkg-variables. Args hold the command-line arguments, starting with the program name.

Therefore, to get the program name, use os.Args[0]

os.Args[0] // name of the command

os.Args1 // first command line parameter,

os.Args[2] // second command line parameter...

 Example :

 package main

 import (
 "os"
 "fmt"
 )

 func main() {
 fmt.Fprintf(os.Stderr, "your own program name is %s \n", os.Args[0])

 }

$ go run myownprogramname.go

your own program name is /var/folders/52/tbjrbqsn6ysdrbqkx91tx6640000gn/T/go-build916658700/command-line-arguments/_obj/exe/myownprogramname

$ go build myownprogramname.go

$ ./myownprogramname

your own program name is ./myownprogramname