Re: Good practice or not to close the file before System.exit(1)?

From:

Patricia Shanahan <pats@acm.org>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.java.help

Date:

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 05:09:23 -0700

Message-ID:

<CqOdnTCcLoBr8izQnZ2dnUVZ_uOdnZ2d@earthlink.com>

On 4/22/2011 4:39 AM, rossum wrote:

On 22 Apr 2011 01:57:28 GMT, ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram)
wrote:

rossum<rossum48@coldmail.com> writes:

The standard way to do this is by putting the close in the finally
block of a try ... finally. Have you covered them in your course yet?

  How would this help in

BufferedReader inputFile = new BufferedReader(...);
try { ... System.exit( 1 ); }
finally { inputFile.close(); }

  ? I do not endorse writing ??System.exit?? in the middle of a program
  as above, but I though that was what the OP wanted to do.

Good catch, my mistake. System.exit() bypasses any finally blocks.
Ouch.

To the OP: don't use System.exit(), throw an exception instead.

If the program should terminate with a non-zero status code, the OP has
to call System.exit(). Exceptions can only reduce the number of
different places where it is called, and put the calls at an appropriate
level in the call hierarchy.

Patricia