Is it safe to use Apache commons-io IOUtils.closeQuietly?

Question

Is this code

    BufferedWriter bw = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter("test.txt"));
    try {
        bw.write("test");
    } finally {
        IOUtils.closeQuietly(bw);
    }

safe or not? As far as I understand when we close a BufferedWriter it will flush its buffer to the underlying stream and may fail due to an error. But IOUtils.closeQuietly API says that any exceptions will be ignored.

Is it possible a data loss will go unnoticed due to IOUtils.closeQuietly?

Answer 1

The code should look like this regarding to the javadoc of closeQuietly():

BufferedWriter bw = null;

try {
    bw = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter("test.txt"));
    bw.write("test");
    bw.flush(); // you can omit this if you don't care about errors while flushing
    bw.close(); // you can omit this if you don't care about errors while closing
} catch (IOException e) {
    // error handling (e.g. on flushing)
} finally {
    IOUtils.closeQuietly(bw);
}

closeQuietly() is not intended for general use instead of calling close() directly on a Closable. Its intended use-case is for ensuring the close inside a finally-block - all error handling you need have to be done BEFORE that.

That means, if you want to react on Exceptions during the call of close() or flush() then you've to handle it the normal way. Adding closeQuietly() in your finally-block just ensures the close, e.g. when the flush failed and close was not called in try-block.

Answer 2

It is safe so long as your application doesn't care whether the write succeeded without error. If your application needs to handle write errors it is not safe as buffered data flushed on close may be lost and the error swallowed.

Answer 3

Yes, it's safe to use it but only for Java6 and lower. From Java7, you should user try-with-resource.

It will eliminate much of the boilerplate code you have and the need to use IOUtils.closeQuietly.

Now, you example:

    BufferedWriter bw = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter("test.txt"));
    try {
        bw.write("test");
    } finally {
        IOUtils.closeQuietly(bw);
    }

Can be written as:

   try (BufferedWriter bw = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter("test.txt"))) {
       bw.write("test");
   }

It's important to note that in order to use the try-with-resource approach, your resource need to implement a new interface called java.lang.AutoCloseable that was introduced in Java 7.

Also, you can include a number of resources in a try-with-resource block, just separate them with ;

   try (
       BufferedWriter bw1 = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter("test1.txt"));
       BufferedWriter bw2 = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter("test2.txt"))
   ) {
       // Do something useful with those 2 buffers!
   }   // bw1 and bw2 will be closed in any case

Answer 4

It is possible in theory but I can't say I have ever seen close() fail. Usually fail fast means that a previous IO operations such as opening the file will fail first. You can write a close which doesn't ignore IOExceptions but this could clobber the true cause of an exception if it is something in the try/catch block which failed.

What you want is something like the following (which is overkill in most cases)

try {
    // write to bw.
    bw.close(); // throw IOException if an error occurs.

} finally {
    // don't clobber a previous IOException
    IOUtils.closeQuietly(bw);
}