Wow, I could have sworn we had removed all of the bare excepts when we started running pep8.  You're right, there are lots of these in `fs.py`, and that should probably be fixed expediently.  Do you want to make a separate pull req with that cleanup?  In the interim, doing the right thing here would be good - catch the error, log it back to the master, and return status 1.  It's a lot easier for slaves to handle rc=1 from a step than an exception, so for simple things like "directory does not exist" I think that would be preferable to propagating the exception to the master.