Question

I’m write some text a file then delete it, but the deletion is failed.

The code is very simple:

import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileOutputStream;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.OutputStream;

public class TestFile {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
        File file = new File("c:\\abc.txt");
        writeFile(file, "hello");

        // delete the file
        boolean deleted = file.delete();
        System.out.println("Deleted? " + deleted);

    }

    public static void writeFile(File file, String content) throws IOException {
        OutputStream out = null;
        try {
            out = new FileOutputStream(file);
            out.write(content.getBytes("UTF-8"));
        } catch (IOException e) {
            try {
                out.close();
            } catch (IOException e1) {
                // ignored
            }
        }
    }
}

The output is:

Deleted? false

And there is a file abc.txt contains hello still there under c:.

Then I use FileUtils.writeStringToFile(...) from commons-io.jar instead, the file will be deleted.

But I don’t know where is wrong with my code, please help me to find it out.

Answer 1

You are only closing the file if you get an IOException.

Change it to a finally block and you will be able to close and delete the file.

public static void writeFile(File file, String content) throws IOException {
    OutputStream out = new FileOutputStream(file);
    try {
        out.write(content.getBytes("UTF-8"));
    } finally {
        try {
            out.close();
        } catch (IOException ignored) {
        }
    }
}