Dealing with exceptions

[Chris Angelico]

On Sun, Mar 3, 2013 at 4:40 AM, bvdp <bob at mellowood.ca> wrote:
> For example, I'm writing a little program do copy specific files to a USB stick. To do the actual copy I'm using:
>
>     try:
>        shutil.copy(s, os.path.join(usbpath, songname))
>      except ...
>
> now, I need to figure out just what exceptions to handle.

Here's a bit of a left-field thought: Maybe none of them.

What are you actually doing when you get an exception? Can you
plausibly recover? If not - that is, if you're going to abort the
whole operation anyway - then save yourself the trouble of writing the
try/catch, and just let the exception propagate up (to the console, if
nowhere else).

On the other hand, if you want to simply report the error and continue
on (meaning you get as many songs copied as possible), then do what
others have recommended and catch OSError.

ChrisA