Mastering Go - Second Edition

About log.Fatal()

In this section, you will see the log.Fatal() function in action. The log.Fatal() function is used when something really bad has happened and you just want to exit your program as fast as possible after reporting the bad situation.

The use of log.Fatal() is illustrated in the logFatal.go program, which contains the following Go code:

package main 
 
import ( 
    "fmt" 
    "log" 
    "log/syslog" 
) 
 
func main() { 
    sysLog, err := syslog.New(syslog.LOG_ALERT|syslog.LOG_MAIL, "Some program!") 
    if err != nil { 
        log.Fatal(err) 
    } else { 
        log.SetOutput(sysLog) 
    } 
 
    log.Fatal(sysLog) 
    fmt.Println("Will you see this?") 
} 

Executing log.Fatal() will create the following output:

$ go run logFatal.go
exit status 1
  

As you can easily understand, the use of