What is the use of printStackTrace() method in Java?

I am going through a socket program. In it, printStackTrace is called on the IOException object in the catch block.
What does printStackTrace() actually do?

catch(IOException ioe)
{
    ioe.printStackTrace();
}

I am unaware of its purpose. What is it used for?

It's a method on Exception instances that prints the stack trace of the instance to System.err.

It's a very simple, but very useful tool for diagnosing an exceptions. It tells you what happened and where in the code this happened.

Here's an example of how it might be used in practice:

try {
    // ...
} catch (SomeException e) { 
    e.printStackTrace();
}

Note that in "serious production code" you usually don't want to do this, for various reasons (such as System.out being less useful and not thread safe). In those cases you usually use some log framework that provides the same (or very similar) output using a command like log.error("Error during frobnication", e);.

I was kind of curious about this too, so I just put together a little sample code where you can see what it is doing:

try {
    throw new NullPointerException();
}
catch (NullPointerException e) {
    System.out.println(e);
}

try {
    throw new IOException();
}
catch (IOException e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
}
System.exit(0);

Calling println(e):

java.lang.NullPointerException

Calling e.printStackTrace():

java.io.IOException
      at package.Test.main(Test.java:74)

It helps to trace the exception. For example you are writing some methods in your program and one of your methods causes bug. Then printstack will help you to identify which method causes the bug. Stack will help like this:

First your main method will be called and inserted to stack, then the second method will be called and inserted to the stack in LIFO order and if any error occurs somewhere inside any method then this stack will help to identify that method.

printStackTrace() helps the programmer to understand where the actual problem occurred. printStacktrace() is a method of the class Throwable of java.lang package. It prints several lines in the output console. The first line consists of several strings. It contains the name of the Throwable sub-class & the package information. From second line onwards, it describes the error position/line number beginning with at.

The last line always describes the destination affected by the error/exception. The second last line informs us about the next line in the stack where the control goes after getting transfer from the line number described in the last line. The errors/exceptions represents the output in the form a stack, which were fed into the stack by fillInStackTrace() method of Throwable class, which itself fills in the program control transfer details into the execution stack. The lines starting with at, are nothing but the values of the execution stack. In this way the programmer can understand where in code the actual problem is.

Along with the printStackTrace() method, it's a good idea to use e.getmessage().