Here's some things on printing standard format Unix errors in Python programs specifically,based on things that I've both seen and done myself.

First, I tend to wind up putting standard warn() and die() functions into my programs, but they only handle very low level details(putting the program name in and flushing things as necessary ). Beyond that:

• you should always catch EnvironmentError instead of anything morespecific. Functions are inconsistent about whether they raise IOError or OSError , so you shouldn'