The I/O Package - The Java Programming Language - page 741

turned. If no bytes are read because the end of the stream
was found, the value 1 is returned. If count is zero then no
bytes are read and zero is returned. This method blocks until
input is available, the end of stream is found, or an excep-
tion is thrown. If the first byte cannot be read for any reason
other than reaching the end of the streamin particular, if the
stream has already been closedan IOException is thrown. Once
a byte has been read, any failure that occurs while trying to
read subsequent bytes is not reported with an exception but
is treated as encountering the end of the streamthe method
completes normally and returns the number of bytes read be-
fore the failure occurred.
public int read(byte[] buf) throws IOException
Equivalent to read(buf,0, buf.length) .
public long skip(long count) throws IOException
Skips as many as count bytes of input or until the end of the
stream is found. Returns the actual number of bytes skipped.
If count is negative, no bytes are skipped.
public int available() tHRows IOException
Returns the number of bytes that can be read (or skipped
over) without blocking. The default implementation returns
zero.
public void close() tHRows IOException
Closes the input stream. This method should be invoked to re-
lease any resources (such as file descriptors) associated with
the stream. Once a stream has been closed, further opera-
tions on the stream will throw an IOException . Closing a previ-
ously closed stream has no effect. The default implementation
of close does nothing.