My 3 cents (not proposed yet, AFAIK): 1. Simple Variant: get_it() except (IndexError: None) 2. Variant with 'as': get_it() except (OSError as exc: exc.errno) 3. Variant with multiple exceptions: get_it() except (FileNotFound: 0, OSError as exc: exc.errno, Exception: None) Cheers. *j