Go Commands for Penetration Testing

Common Go commands for building and cross-compiling pentesting tools.

A lot of modern offensive tooling is written in Go, so it’s worth knowing the handful of go commands needed to build and tweak it yourself.

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go run main.go   # Run a Go file directly without producing a binary

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go build main.go   # Compile a Go file into a binary

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go build -ldflags "-w -s" main.go   # Build a smaller binary by stripping debug symbols and the symbol table

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# Cross-compile on Windows to produce a Linux binary
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$env:GOOS = "linux"
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$env:GOARCH = "amd64"
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go build -ldflags "-w -s" main.go

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go doc fmt.Println   # Show documentation for a package, function or method

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go fmt main.go   # Reformat a Go file to the standard style

Golang