Identify if output goes to the terminal or is being redirected, in Golang May 16 2021

Good command-line tools are a pleasure to work with. A feature I’m always grateful for is when the developer took the time to provide an output that is human readable and an output that is easy to pass to another tool for additional processing. A neat trick to differentiate between these two cases is by having the application identify if the output is being “piped” to another program or not. If the process’s output is not being piped or redirected, we can assume that the user is looking at the results via a terminal. If that is not the case, our application could behave differently and show output that is easier to parse by another program. In this post, I’ll show you how to determine if the stdout of a program is being redirected or piped using the Go programming language.