🐤 Create a new file in Go

To create a new empty file in Go, use the os.Create() function.

• It creates a new file if it does not exist, with the file mode 0666, for reading and writing.
• It truncates the file if it exists, which means that the contents of the file are removed without deleting the file.
• The returned file descriptor is open for reading and writing.
• If there is some problem, the function returns an error of type *os.PathError.

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "log"
    "os"
)

func main() {
    f, err := os.Create("testFile.txt")
    if err != nil {
        log.Fatal(err)
    }
    defer f.Close()
    fmt.Println(f.Name())
}

Always remember to close the open file descriptor when you finish working with the file so that the system can reuse it:

defer f.Close()

You can then write data to this file. See how to do this in one of our previous tutorials here.