Makes an attempt to skip over n bytes of data from the input stream, discarding the skipped bytes. However, it may skip over some smaller number of bytes, possibly zero. This may result from any of a number of conditions; reaching end of file before n bytes have been skipped is only one possibility. This method never throws an EOFException. The actual number of bytes skipped is returned.

Parameters:

n

the number of bytes to be skipped.

Returns:  the number of bytes actually skipped.

Exceptions:

IOException

if an I/O error occurs.