Powerful Command-Line Applications in Go

Compiling Your Tool for Different Platforms

By default, the go build tool builds an executable binary for the current operating system and architecture. You can also use go build to build your command-line tool for a different platform even if you don’t have access to that platform. For example, if you’re using Linux, you can build a Windows or macOS binary that can be executed on those platforms without Go installed. This process is called cross-compilation. Let’s build the word counter tool for the Windows platform by setting the GOOS environment variable to windows before running the build tool:

$ GOOS=windows go build
$ ls
go.mod  main.go  main_test.go  wc  wc.exe

Use the file command to get information about the new wc.exe ...