CODEWITHSUNDEEP
curl
user354134
user354134

Reputation:

curl won't download empty file

curl -o foo.txt http://test.barrycarter.info/emptyfile.txt
curl -O http://test.barrycarter.info/emptyfile.txt

I just tried both the above, and neither foo.txt nor emptyfile.txt were created.

How can I make curl create them? Knowing that a file (URL) exists and is empty can be useful.

In particular, I'm trying to mirror geonames daily updates, and it so happens that today's "http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/alternateNamesDeletes-2015-05-28.txt" file is empty. It would be useful to know this instead of simply not downloading it.

(Note: I created an emptyfile above for testing, since geonames' file will disappear within a day)

Upvotes: 3

Views: 1799

Answers (2)

Daniel Stenberg
Daniel Stenberg

Reputation: 58004

Curl didn't use to store anything on zero byte downloads, but it does since version 7.42.0.

Upvotes: 4

Jon Molnar
Jon Molnar

Reputation: 193

Can you use wget instead? That will do exactly what you want.

If not, try this:

curl -v -o file.txt url://... 2> log.txt
grep '^HTTP/.* 404' log.txt

The return code from grep will be 0 if the file was not found, 1 otherwise.

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions