cftutil CFTFILE FNAME = data/cftcata, TYPE = CAT, RECNB = 1000000
CFTU26E CFTFILE  _ Error ( Catalog file creation error)
cftutil error code 8

The CFTUTIL CFTFILE command check for remaining disk space at the very start and the operation is not attempted when the free space doesn't permit the file creation.

Note:
With CFT version 2.6.4 the size of a single catalog record is 8KB
Starting with version 2.7.x, one catalog record is 12KB

1M records will needs about 16GB of disk space.

The encountered issue is related to not enough disk space