Comment 1:

I'm sorry that this code crashes your Mac. Can you please provide the following data 
1. If there is any sort of crash report provided by OSX on restart, please attach it
here. 
2. Use the os/exec package which is specifically designed to do what you want.
3. Details about your hardware and OSX version as well as xcode version and the version
of go used. 
It is possible that causing syscall.Exec without the correct arguments could crash the
OSX kernel but that would be an issue in the kernel, not go (we're just an average user
space process)

Status changed to WaitingForReply.

Comment 2:

Does it still crash if you make args[0] be "/bin/cp" ?

Comment 3 by MrWanny:

Thanks for the help,
both of the suggested options works! 
      exec.Command("cp", "-rf", "goTools/data/", service.Name+"/trunk/").Output()
or
      binary, lookErr := exec.LookPath("cp")
      if lookErr != nil {
          panic(lookErr)
       }
      args := []string{"/bin/cp", "-rf", "goTools/data/", service.Name+"/trunk/"}
      env := os.Environ()
                        
     execErr := syscall.Exec(binary, args, env)
     if execErr != nil {
            panic(execErr)
     }
For completeness I attached the kernel panic, and it is happening on OS X 10.9.4
15-inch, Mid 2012 Xcode Version 5.1.1 (5B1008)
Thanks again

Attachments:

1. Kernel_2014-08-04-175043_Wannys-MacBook.panic (6296 bytes)

Comment 4:

Does it still crash with your AV software disabled/removed ?

Labels changed: added release-none, repo-main, os-macosx.

Comment 5 by MrWanny:

After disabling Sophos AV the program seams works OK

Comment 6:

Thanks for confirming. You may wish to report this issue to your AV vendor; their kext
is corrupting kernel memory.

Status changed to Fixed.

Comment 7 by MrWanny:

Will do, thanks a lot for the help.

Comment 8 by bob.cook.sophos:

I'm from Sophos, looking for some help in reproduction steps (maybe a full Go program
rather than just a snippet). Also worth noting the panic log shows an old version
installed, no longer supported. You should upgrade, quite a few stability improvements.

Comment 9:

Bob,
A full Go program would be:
package main
import (
     "syscall"
     "os"
     "os/exec"
)
func main() {
     // ... that stuff above
}
Then you can:
$ go build -o crash crash-sophos.go && ./crash

Comment 10 by bob.cook.sophos:

Very helpful, thanks (I'm a Go noob for sure, glad for the assistance). Couldn't use the
"service.Name" object but it didn't seem relevant to the root cause. Wasn't able to repo
the panic using our current release, but will pursue it some more to see what else might
be going on.