Today I wrote some code to winnow a list of users to 'real' users with live home directories that looks roughly like the following:

for uname, hdir in userlist:
   try:
      st = os.stat(hdir)
      if not stat.S_ISDIR(st.st_mode) or \
         stat.S_IMODE(st.st_mode) == 0:
            continue
      # looks good:
      print uname
   except EnvironmentError:
      # accept missing homedir; might be a
      # temporarily missing NFS mount, we
      # can't tell.
      print uname

This code has a relatively subtle flaw because I've accidentally written an over-broad exception catcher here.

As suggested by the comment, when I wrote this code I intended the try block to catch the case where the os.stat failed. The flaw here is that print itself does IO (of course) and so can raise an IO exception. Since I have the print inside my try block, a print -raised IO exception will get caught by it too. You might think that this is harmless because the except will re-do the print and thus presumably immediately have the exception raised again. This contains two assumptions: that the exception will be raised again and that if it isn't, the output is in a good state (as opposed to, say, having written only partial output before an error happened). Neither are entirely sure things and anyways, we shouldn't be relying on this sort of thing when it's really easy to fix. Since both branches of the exception end up at the same print , all we have to do is move it outside the try: block entirely (the except case then becomes just ' pass ').

(My view is that print failing is unusual enough that I'm willing to have the program die with a stack backtrace, partly because this is an internal tool. If that's not okay you'd need to put the print in its own try block and then do something if it failed, or have an overall try block around the entire operation to catch otherwise unexpected EnvironmentError exceptions.)

The root cause here is that I wasn't thinking of print as something that does IO that can throw exceptions. Basic printing is sufficiently magical that it feels different and more ordinary, so it's easy to forget that this is a possibility. It's especially easy to overlook because it's extremely uncommon for print to fail in most situations ( although there are exceptions , especially in Python 3 ). You can also attribute this to a failure to minimize what's done inside try blocks to only things that absolutely have to be there, as opposed to things that are just kind of convenient for the flow of code.

As a side note, one of the things that led to this particular case is that I changed my mind about what should happen when the os.stat() failed because I realized that failure might have legitimate causes instead of being a sign of significant problems with an account that should cause it to be skipped. When I changed my mind I just did a quick change to what the except block did instead of totally revising the overall code, partly because this is a small quick program instead of a big system.