Shell Programming and Scripting

A cp command failure occured on our production system. A shell script copies a source file to a temporary directory -
cp <source file on mount point 1> <dest path on mount point 2>

The same script ran successfully for another file, about 3mins after the failure.

The script did not have a return value check for cp command so I donot know the return value.

Has anyone faced a similar situation? What can be the typical causes for failure of the cp command?


Thanks,
Mynix

1. disk space on target, or quotas

2. network problems if an NFS mount

3. hardware problems at either source or target.