Question

I ran FindBugs to check my code and it complains that method may fail to close stream:

Properties prop = new Properties();
prop.load(new FileInputStream("file.txt"));
...

Is it a mistake or just false positive? Will this stream be properly closed?

Answer 1

Stream handling is tedious (prior to Java 7). Before that you have to manually close the stream.

InputStream is = null;
try {
   is = new FileInputStream(..);
   // do something with stream
} finally {
   try {
      is.close();
   } catch (Exception ex){ 
      //report problem
   }
}

apache commons-lang can shorten the finally clause by its IOUtils.closeQuitely(is), but note that it hides the exception