Actually, I just realized something:

$ perl -e '
> die '
Died at -e line 2.
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I mis-counted the lines in my example of printing to a file handle without enough space. The die was occuring at the print after all. I'm not sure if you can rely on this feature to be cross-platform (my particular system is Linux 2.6.5, glibc 2.3.2, Perl 5.8.2).