I agree, especially since 'go build', 'go install', 'go test', 'go generate', 'go vet', 'go fmt', etc will do what you expect when you run them without paramete

I agree, especially since 'go build', 'go install', 'go test', 'go generate', 'go vet', 'go fmt', etc will do what you expect when you run them without parameters. I think the difference may be that 'go run' expect one package to run, while the others can take multiple. If you have a library (no top-level main package) that comes with two tools foo and bar, I don't think 'go run' could know which package to run. Example tree: go.mod go.sum library.go // package library cmd/foo/foo.go // package main cmd/bar/bar.go // package main