How to ignore all potential exceptions in Python?

Question

I'm writing a custom backup script in Python. Sometimes the mkdir function or the print function or whatever function are failing for diverse reasons. Such exceptions stop the whole script and halt the backup in the middle, which is very frustrating. So far, I've managed these problems by adding try: ... except: ... statements and properly managing these exceptions. However, one day some other statement or function might raise an exception as well because of some other reason that hasn't been triggered yet.

Is there a way to tell a script to proceed anyway? An equivalent of wrapping every single statement of the code in a try: ... except: pass clause? A log would be better of course.

I've noticed that when programming with GUI toolkits like Tkinter, the application keeps running even if exceptions are raised. Is it possible to accomplish this type of thing with the console?

Answer 1

There actually is a module that is supposed to do exactly that: https://github.com/ajalt/fuckitpy.

Although it was obviously written as a joke. I cannot imagine a situation where doing something like that is a good idea. God, I can't believe I'm even suggesting that as a solution.

What you should do instead is identify what lines of code can produce what kind of errors, and handle those errors properly. There is only so much places where errors can actually happen - mostly while interfacing with outside systems, including filesystem, network, user input etc. And remember that actually failing is often better than continuing "work" and messing up your data, files and so on. Exceptions are there for a reason, they are not a result of Guido's malice.