Detect no space left on device error

Question

Is there a system indipendent way of detecting when an IOException is related to a "no space left on device" error? IOException has no methods. Shall I treat it as a generic I/O error without explaining the user why? Or should I simply display the exception message string to the user (which might be too techinical)?

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:58

Java, differently from other languages like C#, does not keep track of the cause of the IOException, but it uses subclasses to better specify the motivation of the exception, for example FileNotFoundException is a subclass of IOException.

Generally is a good idea to specify the cause for the most common sublcasses, and prefix the error message for IOException with a generic description to facilitate the user.

try {
   ...
} catch (FileNotFoundException e) {
  System.out.println("File not found: " + e.getMessage());
} catch (.. other subclasses ..) {
   ...
} catch (IOException e) { // anything else
  System.out.println("I/O Exception: " + e.getMessage());
  e.printStackTrace();
}

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:22

1

As part of exception handling, you can check for the available disk space using these methods provided by the File class:

public long getTotalSpace()
public long getFreeSpace()
public long getUsableSpace()

More details can be found in this related question: How to find how much disk space is left using Java?

edited May 23 '17 at 12:22

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answered Jul 19 '15 at 11:58

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I don't know... it might not be reliable. There are a ton of reasons possible for a no space left error, such as quota exceeded. And on ext2/3/4 file systems you can reserve some blocks for the superuser. – Daniele Ricci Jul 19 '15 at 13:55

Detect no space left on device error

2 Answers2