Updated to aws-cli 0.83 (with updated botocore)
Now using:
aws s3 get-object --bucket --key <output_file>
always creates an empty <output_file>.
Also this cmd always returns the string 'True' to STDOUT even if the command should fail (ie. when using an invalid bucket/key)
The buckets in this case are in eu-west-1 (if that makes any difference)
Cheers,
Ben