Re: cp command

[Bob Proulx]

Patrick J Clas wrote:
> Is it intentional that no matter what the failure is, cp always returns 1 
> instead of something meaningful for various failures?

You say that as if returning a 1 upon a failure is not meaningful.
Therefore you must have something in particular in mind.  Could you
expand a little on what you are thinking here?  Is there anything in
particular that is inadequate?

In general there are many possible ways for a program to fail.
Personally I believe that trying to enumerate all possible failures is
not a good way to do things because it is never good to try to
enumerate an unbounded set.  And also on different operating systems
there will be different failure modes available.  This makes the
handling of all possible errors impossible to keep the same across all
platforms.  Better to keep the model straight forward.

Bob