NonFatal

Extractor of non-fatal Throwables. Will not match fatal errors like VirtualMachineError (for example, OutOfMemoryError and StackOverflowError, subclasses of VirtualMachineError), ThreadDeath, LinkageError, InterruptedException, ControlThrowable.

Note that scala.util.control.ControlThrowable, an internal Throwable, is not matched by NonFatal (and would therefore be thrown).

For example, all harmless Throwables can be caught by:

object log {
  def error(e: Throwable, msg: String): Unit = println(s"$msg: $e")
}
 try {
   // dangerous stuff goes here, we throw an exception for demonstration purposes
   throw new RuntimeException("test")
 } catch {
   case NonFatal(e) => log.error(e, "Something not that bad.")
  // or
   case e if NonFatal(e) => log.error(e, "Something not that bad.")
 }