Re: File overwritten with HTTP/1.1 304 Not Modified

On Sat, 31 Aug 2019, Paul Gilmartin via curl-users wrote:

> *however* my --output file is overwritten with an empty file.
> I'd prefer that this not happen.
>
> Is there a combination of options that preserves the file in case of 304?
> Should I consider this a bug?
>
> I believe an earlier release of curl on Raspberry Pi did not overwrite.

I believe we may have at some point changed the behavior slightly on writing a
zero byte body - but I can't remember why. I don't think this is 304 specific
but works the same no matter which response code.

The question of course remains what the "correct" behavior is. A zero byte
file could very well be interpreted as the correct way to represent a zero
byte response body...

> I understand that in case of some errors, such as 404, the user prefers to
> receive the file.

1. curl will of course save the response body for any response code, but 304s
are special as they are defined to never have a body.

2. --fail will make curl not save the 404 response body

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