defer func() { _ = resp.Body.Close() }()

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Gert

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Aug 16, 2017, 8:05:39 AM 8/16/17
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To pass errcheck I need to do something like

defer func() { _ = resp.Body.Close() }()

instead of 

defer resp.Body.Close()

Is this something the errcheck tool can figure out to mark as valid instead or does the errcheck tool need help from the compiler so the second case is also ok?

Gert

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Aug 16, 2017, 8:18:48 AM 8/16/17
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Never mind the tool is right I could print the error or something like that, I assumed you couldn't do anything useful with the error anyway in a defer

Jakob Borg

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Aug 16, 2017, 10:40:29 AM 8/16/17
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As far as I'm concerned, `defer resp.Body.Close()` is perfectly cromulent and there's no need to for error checking contortions to satisfy the lint tool. If we're talking about a http.Request I doubt that the close can ever fail (I haven't checked; but it doesn't seem like something that would make sense). More generally, Close() failing on something read-only is not something I'd worry much about. If it happens systematically there's something seriously wrong with the system and you'll get errors from Open() or similar when you run out of file descriptors...

//jb
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Eric Johnson

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Aug 17, 2017, 3:25:11 AM 8/17/17
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For the truly paranoid, perhaps write a helper function "EnsureClosed()" or something like that, which will do the close, but perhaps also appropriately log a failure to close.

dja...@gmail.com

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Aug 17, 2017, 4:50:05 AM 8/17/17
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Robert Fritzsche

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Aug 17, 2017, 12:46:57 PM 8/17/17
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Hi Gert,

it the -ignore flag an option for you? E.g. errcheck  -ignore '[cC]lose' $(GOPACKAGES)


Cheers!
Robert

Amnon

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Jun 27, 2020, 6:21:30 AM 6/27/20
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Apologies for replying to an old post.
But I am sometimes a bit slow in reading my messages.

I too think that errcheck's is a bit severe in its treatment of deferred calls to Close().

So I forked the code and changed the behaviour to be more permissive.
https://github.com/amnonbc/errcheck

Feel free to use it.

- amnon

Anton Savitsky

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May 29, 2026, 3:14:56 PM May 29
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If you use golangci-lint, you can use //nolint:errcheck to disable errcheck linter

defer resp.Body.Close() //nolint:errcheck
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