Killed `rm` and `cp` on nfs share

Question

I am just testing an rsnapshot installation on my laptop which should backup to a NAS mounted via nfs on my laptop.

On one test rsnapshot died with a cp -al problem (i.e. a problem with hard links) when moving daily.0 to daily.1, I think the problem was when it tried to copy the ../etc/alternatives/ part...

During debugging I tried to remove the directory daily.0 on the nfs manually on command line, however rm exited with the message killed. A similar problem occured with cp a few days ago though I cannot reproduce it (cp between two nfs subdirectories exited also with the message killed).

So is there any way to get more informative error messages from rm and cp to find out what's the actual problem is?

Edit After reading kyle-jones anwer I watched my RAM usage during several operations and confirmed that when I do something on my nfs mount on large directories, my memory fills up very fast up to 4GB (that's my physical memory on my laptop) and then the process is killed.

This happend for: cp, rm, du and even for ls.

As mount options for my nfs mount I used:

-o rw,hard,intr,tcp,actimeo=3 (and specified nfs via -t nfs).

Answer 1

The "Killed" message isn't coming from rm or cp, rather it's coming from the shell telling you that the process was forcibly terminated with signal 9. The usual reason this happens is that the operating system is running low on memory and swap space and has no choice but to randomly kill processes to free up RAM.