Close a Scanner linked to System.in

The simplest thing is to not close Scanner if you don't want to close the underlying stream.

Ideally you should create just one Scanner which you use for the life of the program. In any case, it appears you don't have a good reason to close it.

One option is to wrap your System.in stream in a CloseShieldInputStream that prevents it from being closed. Your reader would then use the CloseShieldInputStream rather than the raw System.in stream.

Here is the API for the class: http://commons.apache.org/io/apidocs/org/apache/commons/io/input/CloseShieldInputStream.html

Instead of adding shield classes and stuff like that, just put a nice comment and a

        @SuppressWarnings("resource")

That's good enough. And I don't seem to see a lot of drawbacks to this approach. Don't forget the comment.