Handling InterruptedException in Java

Question

What is the difference between the following ways of handling InterruptedException? What is the best way to do it?

try{
 //...
} catch(Interrupt         


        

Answer 1

To me the key thing about this is: an InterruptedException is not anything going wrong, it is the thread doing what you told it to do. Therefore rethrowing it wrapped in a RuntimeException makes zero sense.

In many cases it makes sense to rethrow an exception wrapped in a RuntimeException when you say, I don't know what went wrong here and I can't do anything to fix it, I just want it to get out of the current processing flow and hit whatever application-wide exception handler I have so it can log it. That's not the case with an InterruptedException, it's just the thread responding to having interrupt() called on it, it's throwing the InterruptedException in order to help cancel the thread's processing in a timely way.

So propagate the InterruptedException, or eat it intelligently (meaning at a place where it will have accomplished what it was meant to do) and reset the interrupt flag. Note that the interrupt flag gets cleared when the InterruptedException gets thrown; the assumption the Jdk library developers make is that catching the exception amounts to handling it, so by default the flag is cleared.

So definitely the first way is better, the second posted example in the question is not useful unless you don't expect the thread to actually get interrupted, and interrupting it amounts to an error.

Here's an answer I wrote describing how interrupts work, with an example. You can see in the example code where it is using the InterruptedException to bail out of a while loop in the Runnable's run method.