Create a bootable USB stick with terminal UI display

Building It

As always, the listings for this article are available for download from the Linux Magazine web server [2]. Once you have the three files – cpchunks.go (Listing 1), drive.go (Listing 2), and isoflash.go (Listing 3) – in one directory, the first two lines of Listing 4 create the isoflash binary. Then, you need to call the program with sudo to have write permissions for the USB stick (last line).

Listing 4

Calling the Binary

$ go mod init isoflash
$ go build
$ sudo ./isoflash ubuntu.iso

Right after the program starts, it immediately instructs the user to plug in the USB stick (Figure 1). As soon as it finds the newly plugged in device, it starts to copy the data after confirmation from the user (Figure 2). It uses a progress bar to show the current state of affairs (Figure 3). After finishing, the UI reports that the action was successful (Figure 4). All done!

Figure 1: The Go program waiting for a USB stick to be inserted.
Figure 2: The 32GB stick I plugged in has been detected. The program is waiting for me to confirm.
Figure 3: Copying has started. A progress bar shows the number of bytes from the ISO file already copied to the USB stick.
Figure 4: The bootable USB stick now has all the required data and is ready for use.

Infos

  1. "Programming Snapshot: Progress Bar" by Mike Schilli, Linux Magazine, issue 220, March 2019, pp. 46-49, https://www.linux-magazine.com/Issues/2019/220/Progress-by-Installments/(language)/eng-US
  2. Listings for this article: ftp://ftp.linux-magazine.com/pub/listings/linux-magazine.com/239

The Author

Mike Schilli works as a software engineer in the San Francisco Bay area, California. Each month in his column, which has been running since 1997, he researches practical applications of various programming languages. If you email him at mailto:mschilli@perlmeister.com he will gladly answer any questions.

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