[kevg123]

The more common recommendation is to catch what you need to handle in a special way (if any) and then have a catch-all (or re-throw) for the rest, and if you don't need to catch anything specific, then just catch (or re-throw) all.

Think of exceptions like error codes. Most often one just checks if there is an error or not. Sometimes, one checks for specific error codes in addition to the general check. It would be rare to check every single error code, though possible.

By this analogy, I think the recommendation to check each type of exception is very uncommon.

Most importantly, make sure you do always catch exceptions at some level and handle them somehow (even if it's just logging), and also make sure no exception/error information is lost (e.g. blank catch block, not logging all exception details, not re-throwing with an inner exception so the original stack is lost, etc.).