wget creates empty file

[makeacode]

after doing some googling it seems that wget will create an empty file even if there was a problem accessing the specified url. i've had this happen a few times and the module does not fix it since it only checks for the presence of the desired file.

Possible solutions are:

wget "url" -O file || rm -f file

• or -

curl -f http://nonexistent/file.jpg -o localfile.jpg

I don't know which is preferred so if you have an opinion on one over the other I'll submit a pull request with the changes.

[pcfens]

I'm not able to get wget to make that happen when I go to URLs that return a 404 or hosts that don't exist at all. Maybe it's a distribution/version thing?

Rather than using an exec resource, what if I changed it from wget to use lwf/remote_file instead?

[makeacode]

Hmm...I tried on Scientific Linux 6.8 at work and Ubuntu 14 vagrant box and both do it.

Try this and you should end up with 0 byte file called test:

wget -O 'test' 'http://www.google1.com'

[pcfens]

I was doing something wrong and completely different when I tested this and couldn't re-create the issue.

I'll try and get a new release rolled up tomorrow early afternoon.