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For facter/puppet, I installed a one-line shell script. Several, actually. On subsequent runs, and with facter -p, I see the following output:

Fact file /etc/facter/facts.d/system_facts_<factname>.sh was parsed but returned an empty data set

If I run the script manually from the command-line, I get the expected output. If I use facter -p <factname> I get the empty string.

Puppet version: 3.8.2

Note: not a duplicate of Facter - custom fact, returns empty data set when invoked by Puppet agent

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Otheus
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The official documentation helped me realize the script must produce output in the form of key=value. Thus, a single script can generate many different sets of information. (Now I realize why facter is so damn slow.) But if it produces output in just the form of value, facter doesn't know what to do with it.

Otheus
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  • Yes, but how does this relate to Facter's performance? Just being curious about your reasoning here. – Felix Frank Aug 21 '15 at 13:33
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    Because it cannot assume that file X is associated with fact Z, it must search through all possible facter files before it can report on any of them. The end-result is a _a lot_ of file touches. My strace indicated it was opening each possible fact file _3 times_. I also see how facter may have architecturally built in sluggishness to their design -- by allowing facts to be declared multiple times, each with different "weights", it might be impossible to cache the data. – Otheus Aug 21 '15 at 18:18