Getting started with Go

Go is a relatively new language similar in syntax to C (minus ';'s and more sparingly using '(...)'!), but with garbage collection and parallelism intrinsic to the core of the language. It has become popular for the back ends to web hosted applications, but not so much for system tool purposes - in part because of a lack of privilege management functions. These pages are intended to help remedy that.

If you are completely new to Go (the web-searchable keyword for it is golang), the best place to start is the Go Tour.

The following are some walk-through explanations (they should work for go1.11 and newer tool chains) for using the "kernel.org/pub/linux/libs/security/libcap/cap" and psx packages to manage Linux privilege:

• Doing privileged things and dropping privilege

• Changing UIDs etc

• Exploring the capability state of process trees

• Gotchas with Go and the psx and cap packages

Full disclosure, there are other packages that implement more limited support for Linux Capabilities. You might want to look at those too.