fix deprecation warnings about e.message

Using e.message is deprecated since 2.6.8. Changed e.message to e[0]
everywhere and also used str(e[0]) everywhere that the exception message
was being concatenated with a string.
support fetching multiple files and dirs in get()
Merge branch 'fix-deprecated-exc-message' into develop
Merge branch 'feature-get-multiple-paths' into develop