C++ catching all exceptions

Question

try{
    // ...
} catch (...) {
    // ...
}

will catch all C++ exceptions, but it should be considered bad design. You can use c++11's new current_exception mechanism, but if you don't have the ability to use c++11 (legacy code systems requiring a rewrite), then you have no named exception pointer to use to get a message or name. You may want to add separate catch clauses for the various exceptions you can catch, and only catch everything at the bottom to record an unexpected exception. E.g.:

try{
    // ...
} catch (const std::exception& ex) {
    // ...
} catch (const std::string& ex) {
    // ...
} catch (...) {
    // ...
}

Someone should add that one cannot catch "crashes" in C++ code. Those don't throw exceptions, but do anything they like. When you see a program crashing because of say a null-pointer dereference, it's doing undefined behavior. There is no std::null_pointer_exception. Trying to catch exceptions won't help there.

Just for the case someone is reading this thread and thinks he can get the cause of the program crashes. A Debugger like gdb should be used instead.

This is how you can reverse-engineer the exception type from within catch(...) should you need to (may be useful when catching unknown from a third party library) with GCC:

#include <iostream>

#include <exception>
#include <typeinfo>
#include <stdexcept>

int main()
{
    try {
        throw ...; // throw something
    }
    catch(...)
    {
        std::exception_ptr p = std::current_exception();
        std::clog <<(p ? p.__cxa_exception_type()->name() : "null") << std::endl;
    }
    return 1;
}

and if you can afford using Boost you can make your catch section even simpler (on the outside) and potentially cross-platform

catch (...)
{
    std::clog << boost::current_exception_diagnostic_information() << std::endl;
}

try {
   // ...
} catch (...) {
   // ...
}

Note that the ... inside the catch is a real ellipsis, ie. three dots.

However, because C++ exceptions are not necessarily subclasses of a base Exception class, there isn't any way to actually see the exception variable that is thrown when using this construct.