The 'defer file.Close()' ignoring errors is used throughout the examples for golang so I assumed it was the same here. My bad.

you insist on making the wrong choice up front, which is to use defer for something which is non-trivial.

Closing a file is non-trivial? So you have multiple returns in the function and you also need to close the file... better repeat it several times instead of using 'defer'. I'm not sure what the point of 'defer' is if that is the case.

Also the code you linked silently ignores the first N-1 errors, only returning the last one. Maybe in this case it is acceptable, but what kind of error does it return? Could the ignored errors be more relevant than the final one? Who knows.