I see that there is both gofmt and go fmt. What is the difference between gofmt & go fmt?
The gofmt command will process the files given as arguments. The go fmt tool runs gofmt on all the files in the package paths given as arguments. Thus if I am in the encoding/gob directory,
gofmt decode.go
will format the single file decode.go, while the tool run
go fmt .
(. is actually the default) will format all the files in the encoding/gob package.
Run go help fmt to see the difference. In short, go fmt runs gofmt -l -w on the packages specified by the arguments.
The -w flag writes the result back to the source file. The -l flag prints the name of modified files.
The arguments to go fmt are packages (run go help packages for a description). The arguments to gofmt are file system paths.
Here are some examples showing how the arguments are handled differently:
gofmt -w . # formats files in current directory and all sub-directories
go fmt ./... # similar to previous
go fmt . # formats files in current package
gofmt -w foo/bar # formats files in directory $PWD/foo/bar and sub-dirs
go fmt foo/bar # formats files in directory $GOPATH/src/foo/bar
gofmt -w # error, no file or directory specified
go fmt # formats files in current package