Can mv command failure cause loss?

If you don't define data loss, you won't get along.For example,

$mv filea backup/filea

However, any backup/filea that already exists is deleted and lost.Is this data loss or not?

Except for the deletion of the intended file, only consider whether the contents of the file will change or not

1. mv to the same file is detected in advance and nothing happens.That is, no loss. It's easy to assume that you don't do anything stupid, but it's rare that you don't realize that you have a symlink and end up with mv to the same file.

$mvfileb.
$ mv filec<simlink-to-this-directory>/filec
Error pointing out the same file

2.mv that contradicts the directory structure is detected in advance and abbreviated below.

$mkdir hoge
$ mkdir hoge /piyo
$ mv hoge hoge /piyo
Moving directories to subdirectories is error

3. When used in the same disk device, the correspondence between inode and the file name (which is called a directory entry) is only changed, and the file itself is not in touch, so you can think of no data loss.

$mv failed filee
Moving in the same directory appears to be in the same device, so it succeeds without loss.

4. A copy of the file body will be included when moving to another disk device in the same machine.If there is not enough space, it will fail during copying and the original file will not be deleted, so there will be no loss.

$mv filef/mounted_other_drive/fileg

5. Move to a different machine/structured file system above, but lose information that is not functional to the mounting destination.For example, if you mv a sparse file to a non-sparse mounting destination, the size will explode (untested).

During copying, we do not consider data corruption due to a disk device failure (because it is not specific to mv), and the behavior of comparing CRC values of file contents from mv or cp data copy source Data corruption on the network is corrected at the TCP level, so there is no problem.