Comment 4 for bug 75574

cp dies with SIGXFSZ, a signal from BSD that is generated when the device's file-size limit is exceeded, and whose default behavior is to dump core(!).

There may be issues on some filesystems where it can be difficult to determine the true file-size limit, and even after such a check, there is a race condition. Whether or not such a check is performed, however, it should be a simple matter to install a handler for SIGXFSZ.

Note that mv (others? prolly dd...) also has this issue (see duplicates).