Question

I regularly see this style of resource clean-up:

InputStream in = null;
try {
    in = new FileInputStream(file);
    // ...
} finally {
    if (in != null) {
        in.close();
    }
}

I have always used the following style:

final InputStream in = new FileInputStream(file);
try {
    // ...
} finally {
    in.close();
}

But am I missing something? Is there an advantage to the former that I’m not seeing?

Answer 1

I suspect its to avoid having two nested try/catch blocks instead of one.

InputStream in = null;
try {
    in = new FileInputStream(file);
    // ...
} catch(IOException ioe) {
    // handle exception.
} finally {
    IOUtils.closeQuietly(in);
}

The second case is incomplete.

try {
    final InputStream in = new FileInputStream(file);
    try {
        // ...
    } finally {
        in.close();
    }
} catch(IOException e) {
    // handle exception
}

If you have multiple files, this could get really messy.