A good answer might be:

A buffer is a section of memory used as a work area.

The BufferedWriter Stream

Disk input and output is more efficient when a buffer is used. For our small example programs it doesn't matter much. However, programs that do extensive IO should use buffers. The BufferedWriter stream is used for this with a character output stream.

BufferedWriter(Writer out)  
    Construct a buffered character-output stream 

The constructor is used as follows. Since FileWrite is a Writer it is the correct type for the parameter.

BufferedWriter out
   =  new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter("stuff.txt"));  

Different operating systems separate lines of text in different ways. To the annoyance of programmers everywhere, Microsoft operating systems use a two byte sequence at the end of a line of text, but Unix (and Linux) operating systems use just one byte.

QUESTION 13:

Is the '\n' character always appropriate at the end of a line?