pylint warning on 'except Exception:'

because it thinks that you're catching too much. and it's right.

It's good practice to catch only a very narrow range of types. 'Exception' is too general - you will end up catching not just the errors you planned for, but other errors too, which may mask bugs in your code that would be quicker to diagnose if they weren't caught at all, or possibly would be better dealt with by a single very high level exception handler.

Having said that, since Python2.6, catching Exception has become a lot more reasonable, because all the exceptions that you wouldn't want to catch (SystemExit, KeyboardInterrupt) no longer inherit from Exception. They instead inherit from a common BaseException instead. This has been done deliberately in order to make catching Exception relatively harmless, since it is such a common idiom.

See PEP 3110 for details & future plans.

It's considered good practice to not normally catch the root Exception object, instead of catching more specific ones - for example IOException.

Consider if an out of memory exception occurred - simply using "pass" isn't going to leave your programme in a good state.

Pretty much the only time you should catch Exception is at the top level of your programme, where you can (try to) log it, display an error, and exit as gracefully as you can.