What is the type of System.out in Java?

Question

I am just a newbie in Java. I was wondering the way System.out.println() is used. Out is a static field inside System class. The type of out is PrintStream. But when I saw the constructor of PrintStream class, it takes a parameter of type OutputStream and as far as I know we cannot create the object of an abstract class. In that case we must pass some subclass's object to the constructor of PrintStream. What is that class? Same is the System.in. It is also InputStream's reference but what is the type of object it points to as the InputStream is abstract?

Answer 1

PrintStream wraps BufferedOutputStream, which wraps FileOutputStream, which is writing into the console, which has its own FileDescriptor.

Answer 2

A simple way to view the structure of a class is to examine it in a debugger.

As you can see @Andremonify's description is basically what you have.

FileDescriptor

• 0 is System.in
• 1 is System.out
• 2 is System.err
• 3+ is used for other files