GOFMT(1)

NAME
gofmt - format Go programs

SYNOPSIS
gofmt [flags] [path ...]

DESCRIPTION
Gofmt formats Go programs. It uses tabs for indentation and blanks for alignment. Alignment assumes that an editor is using a fixed-width font.

Without an explicit path, it processes the standard input. Given a file, it operates on that file; given a directory, it operates on all .go files in that directory, recursively. (Files starting with a period are ignored.) By default, gofmt prints the reformatted sources to standard output.

OPTIONS

-d  Do not print reformatted sources to standard output. If a file's formatting is different than gofmt's, print diffs to standard output.

-e  Print all (including spurious) errors.

-l  Do not print reformatted sources to standard output. If a file's formatting is different from gofmt's, print its name to standard output.

-r rule
    Apply the rewrite rule to the source before reformatting.

-s  Try to simplify code (after applying the rewrite rule, if any).

-w  Do not print reformatted sources to standard output. If a file's formatting is different from gofmt's, overwrite it with gofmt's version. If an error occurred during overwriting, the original file is restored from an automatic backup.

Debugging support:

-cpuprofile filename
    Write cpu profile to the specified file.

The rewrite rule specified with the -r flag must be a string of the form:

      pattern -> replacement

Both pattern and replacement must be valid Go expressions. In the pattern, single-character lowercase identifiers serve as wildcards matching arbitrary sub-expressions; those expressions will be substituted for the same identifiers in the replacement.

When gofmt reads from standard input, it accepts either a full Go program or a program fragment. A program fragment must be a syntactically valid declaration list, statement list, or expression. When formatting such a fragment, gofmt preserves leading indentation as well as leading and trailing spaces, so that individual sections of a Go program can be formatted by piping them through gofmt.

EXAMPLES
To check files for unnecessary parentheses:

      gofmt -r '(a) -> a' -l *.go

To remove the parentheses:

      gofmt -r '(a) -> a' -w *.go

To convert the package tree from explicit slice upper bounds to implicit ones:

      gofmt -r 'α[β:len(α)] -> α[β:]' -w $GOROOT/src/pkg

  The simplify command
When invoked with -s gofmt will make the following source transformations where possible.

    An array, slice, or map composite literal of the form:
        []T{T{}, T{}}
    will be simplified to:
        []T{{}, {}}

    A slice expression of the form:
        s[a:len(s)]
    will be simplified to:
        s[a:]

    A range of the form:
        for x, _ = range v {...}
    will be simplified to:
        for x = range v {...}

    A range of the form:
        for _ = range v {...}
    will be simplified to:
        for range v {...}

This may result in changes that are incompatible with earlier versions of Go.

AUTHOR
This manual page was written by Michael Stapelberg <stapelberg@debian.org> and is maintained by the Debian Go Compiler Team <team+go-compiler@tracker.debian.org> based on the output of 'go doc cmd/gofmt' for the Debian project (and may be used by others).