Question

This almost seems silly but what is the most reliable pattern to follow when closing an OutputStream? Right now I have something like the following which just seem to be try-catch-finally-overkill:

private void writeContentsToFile(OutputStream ostream, Properties contents) {
    try {
        contents.store(ostream, "comments");
    }
    catch (IOException e) {
        throw new ResourceException("Failed to write contents", e);
    }
    finally {
        try {
            ostream.close();
        }
        catch (IOException e) { /* what can be done here anyway? */ }
    }
}

Why close throws a checked exception is still a mystery to me. I can create wrapper method that does the close/catch block but if there is something already out there like FileUtil.closeFileAndThrowUncheckedException() I would like to use it. This gets a bit more useful when you have lots of smaller projects with lots of devs; one way to do it right.

Answer 1

If you are using Apache Commons, then IOUtils.closeQuietly() does the job nicely. See http://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-io/javadocs/api-1.4/org/apache/commons/io/IOUtils.html#closeQuietly(java.io.OutputStream)