Original exception: yes this is the intent of suppressed exceptions in Java 7. In the meantime it vastly more likely that an exception will be thrown from a write, not a close, so there is little chance of any original exception being concealed; and in the unlikely case that both methods throw an exception, the debugging value of seeing the problem from close outweighs that of the problem from write. For these reasons, and to keep the code as short as possible, for Java 6-compatible code I recommend the simple idiom (do not try to catch any exception from `close`) which almost always does what you want.