The Java I/O classes java.io.Reader, java.io.Writer, java.io.InputStream, java.io.OutpuStream and their various subclasses all have a close() method that can throw an IOException.
Is there any consensus on the proper way to handle such exceptions?
I have often seen recommendations to just silently ignore them, but that feels wrong, and at least in case of resources opened for writing, a problem while closing the file might mean that unflushed data could not be written/sent.
On the other hand, when reading resources, I'm totally unclear on why close() might throw and what to do about it.
So is there any standard recommendation?
A related question is Does close ever throw an IOException?, but that is more about which implementations really do throw, not about how to handle the exceptions.