NAME

       go - tool for managing Go source code

DESCRIPTION

       Many commands apply to a set of packages:

             go action [packages]

       Usually, [packages] is a list of import paths.

       An  import  path  that  is  a  rooted path or that begins with a . or .. element is interpreted as a file
       system path and denotes the package in that directory.

       Otherwise, the import path P denotes the package found in the directory DIR/src/P for some DIR listed  in
       the GOPATH environment variable (For more details see: 'go help gopath').

       If no import paths are given, the action applies to the package in the current directory.

       There  are  four  reserved  names  for paths that should not be used for packages to be built with the go
       tool:

       • "main" denotes the top-level package in a stand-alone executable.

       • "all" expands to all packages found in all the GOPATH trees. For example, 'go list all' lists  all  the
         packages  on the local system. When using modules, "all" expands to all packages in the main module and
         their dependencies, including dependencies needed by tests of any of those.

       • "std" is like all but expands to just the packages in the standard Go library.

       • "cmd" expands to the Go repository's commands and their internal libraries.

       Import paths beginning with "cmd/" only match source code in the Go repository.

       An import path is a pattern if it includes one or more "..." wildcards,  each  of  which  can  match  any
       string,  including the empty string and strings containing slashes. Such a pattern expands to all package
       directories found in the GOPATH trees with names matching the patterns.

       To make common patterns more convenient, there are two special cases.  First, /...  at  the  end  of  the
       pattern  can  match an empty string, so that net/... matches both net and packages in its subdirectories,
       like net/http.  Second, any slash-separated pattern element containing a wildcard never participates in a
       match of the "vendor" element in the path of a vendored package, so that ./... does not match packages in
       subdirectories of ./vendor or  ./mycode/vendor,  but  ./vendor/...  and  ./mycode/vendor/...  do.   Note,
       however,  that  a  directory named vendor that itself contains code is not a vendored package: cmd/vendor
       would be a command named vendor, and the pattern cmd/... matches  it.   See  golang.org/s/go15vendor  for
       more about vendoring.

       An  import  path  can  also  name  a  package  to  be  downloaded  from a remote repository. Run 'go help
       importpath' for details.

       Every package in a program must have a unique import path.  By convention, this is arranged  by  starting
       each  path  with  a  unique  prefix that belongs to you. For example, paths used internally at Google all
       begin with 'google', and paths denoting remote repositories begin with the path  to  the  code,  such  as
       'github.com/user/repo'.

       Packages  in  a program need not have unique package names, but there are two reserved package names with
       special meaning.  The name main indicates a command, not a library.  Commands are built into binaries and
       cannot be imported.  The  name  documentation  indicates  documentation  for  a  non-Go  program  in  the
       directory. Files in package documentation are ignored by the go command.

       As  a  special  case,  if the package list is a list of .go files from a single directory, the command is
       applied to a single synthesized package made up of exactly those files, ignoring any build constraints in
       those files and ignoring any other files in the directory.

       Directory and file names that begin with "." or "_" are ignored by the go tool, as are directories  named
       "testdata".

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  help  packages'
       for the Debian project (and may be used by others).

                                                   2021-09-06                                     GO-PACKAGES(7)