Question

In my app I’m writing a file to store some execution info and once the execution is done I want to delete the temp file. The issue is even after file close or flush by streams I cannot delete the file. I tried

Thread.sleep(1000);
file.delete();

and that didn’t delete the file either. I then created a while loop

while(!file.delete())
   Thread.sleep(1000);

and it was looping forever. I then added

System.gc();
file.delete();

and it worked!!!

I have verified that I have gracefully closed or flushed the file. I want to know why my code worked with System.gc()?

Answer 1

That seems to indicate that you did not call close().

Reason: in the begin time of java, the Object.finalize() method was used to clean up on garbage collection, and for I/O it did a close().

Until the file is in use (not closed), the file cannot be deleted on Windows.