What does "duck an exception" mean?

Question

In the Advantages of Exceptions section of the Java™ tutorials:

A method can duck any exceptions thrown within it, thereby allowing a method farther up the call stack to catch it.

[...]

...ducking an exception requires some effort on the part of the middleman methods. Any checked exceptions that can be thrown within a method must be specified in its throws clause.

What does "duck an exception" mean here? I searched the web and FOLDOC (Free On-line Dictionary of Computing) but didn't find anything that looked promising.

Answer 1

Well, ducking simply means to lower your head in order to avoid being hit or seen. In this case, 'duck an exception' just means avoiding your code from getting hit by an exception.

For your method not to be hit by exception, you throw it further up the call stack by declaring a throws exception on your method

public void myMethod() throws IOException {  } 

If you don't duck, you have to catch it:

public void myMethod() {     try {        // ...        } catch(IOException e) {       // handle exception     }