It depends, what are you going to do if there is an exception? If you are just going to exit the program, then that works fine. If you are going to just skip that file, then the above wont work. If you are going to return to some other state in your program, but abort the file opening, you might want to close any files that were opened. The closing can be taken care if in the except block, but you will have to know which ones opened successfully.
In general I would do something like this for multiple files: [code] filenames = ["fname1","fname2","fname3"] for fn in filenames: try: f = open(fn) except IOError: # handle exception #do something with f [/code] But, that might not work for you if the files aren't homogeneous (each have similar contents). If the files have distinctly different purposes, I would just wrap them each in their own try/except block. I rambled a bit there, but I hope it helps. Matt -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list