I'm trying to make sure my Java application takes reasonable steps to be robust, and part of that involves shutting down gracefully. I am reading about shutdown hooks and I don't actually get how to make use of them in practice.

Is there a practical example out there?

Let's say I had a really simple application like this one below, which writes numbers to a file, 10 to a line, in batches of 100, and I want to make sure a given batch finishes if the program is interrupted. I get how to register a shutdown hook but I have no idea how to integrate that into my application. Any suggestions?

package com.example.test.concurrency;

import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileNotFoundException;
import java.io.FileOutputStream;
import java.io.PrintWriter;

public class GracefulShutdownTest1 {
    final private int N;
    final private File f;
    public GracefulShutdownTest1(File f, int N) { this.f=f; this.N = N; }

    public void run()
    {
        PrintWriter pw = null;
        try {
            FileOutputStream fos = new FileOutputStream(this.f);
            pw = new PrintWriter(fos);
            for (int i = 0; i < N; ++i)
                writeBatch(pw, i);
        }
        catch (FileNotFoundException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
        finally
        {
            pw.close();
        }       
    }

    private void writeBatch(PrintWriter pw, int i) {
        for (int j = 0; j < 100; ++j)
        {
            int k = i*100+j;
            pw.write(Integer.toString(k));
            if ((j+1)%10 == 0)
                pw.write('\n');
            else
                pw.write(' ');
        }
    }

    static public void main(String[] args)
    {
        if (args.length < 2)
        {
            System.out.println("args = [file] [N] "
                    +"where file = output filename, N=batch count");
        }
        else
        {
            new GracefulShutdownTest1(
                    new File(args[0]), 
                    Integer.parseInt(args[1])
            ).run();
        }
    }
}