BufferedWriter try catch Scoping problem

Question

I developed a quick and dirty application to search through a file system for files that contain certain patterns in their names, and it works fine. My problem is I want to use a BufferedWriter to write the results out to a new text file, and a buffered writer must be enclosed in a try catch statement because of a possible IOException. Now the writer is out of scope of the method that needs to call it, and if I put it in the method a new writer and hence a new file will be created each time through. I am sure this is just a design flaw on my part but I have hit this problem before, I was wondering what is a way around this, so the writer can be instantiated, the method that will do that actual writing to the file will be called until the iteration is done, and then the program will exit.
Here is my code, there are some unused variables and objects in there, namely I am not using the BufferedWriter at the moment and was just cutting and pasting from the console:
Thanks!
import java.io.*;
import java.util.*;
public class NextAttempt {
     static List<File> filelist = new ArrayList<File>();
     static PrintStream out = new PrintStream(System.out);
     static File f;
     public static void getWriter() {
          try {
               BufferedWriter writer = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter("C:\\FILE.txt"));
                    for(File f: filelist)
                         writer.append(f.getAbsolutePath());
          catch (Exception e) {}
     public static List<File> browse(File BASE) {
          File[] temp=BASE.listFiles();
               for (int i=0;i<temp.length;i++) {
                    if(temp.getAbsolutePath().contains(File.separator+"PATTERN")&&temp[i].getName().contains(".ext") {     
                         out.println(temp[i].getAbsolutePath());
                         //filelist.add(temp[i]);
                    else if (temp[i].isDirectory()) {
                              BASE=temp[i];
                              rec(BASE);
                    else {
                         BASE=new File("PATH");
          return filelist;
     public static void rec(File BASE) {
          browse(BASE);
     public static void main(String[] args) {
          browse(new File("PATH"));
          out.println("Complete");

Answer 1

Also you can keep passing the file lists up to the callers, so the initial invocation of browse() will return a list of all the files. When you recurse (which you're doing now, apparently), you can append the return value of the recursive call to the caller's own list of files.
Then just print the whole list when you're done.
Another thing you might want to think about... you could use the logging framework to list the files as log entries. That may or may not be useful. The advantage is that the logging code already deals with some of these issues; the disadvantage is that producing a formatted log might result in a format you can't use, or tweaking the format might be more trouble than doing something else.