Number which the user will enter will be stored in getal. You know how to print the value of a variable. More on reddit.com

Basically, all I want is have the scanner read an input for the username, and assign the input to a String variable. ... A simple example to illustrate how java.util.Scanner works would be reading a single integer from System.in. More on stackoverflow.com

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It seems the consensus is that each program only requires a single Scanner object. There is no such consensus. If you need to read from multiple sources you can and should use several scanners. Secondly, what actually does the close() method of Scanner do? It does whatever it needs to do to properly close the underlying source. It can be a bunch of different things or nothing at all. In the case of a file, it signals the OS that you are done reading so it can free any resource associated with the file. For something like a network connection it might be more complicated. Is the file actually being "opened" somewhere? Yes, files are opened. Scanner probably opens it when it is created. Opening a file tells the OS that you are gonna read (or write) from said file, so it can do the necessary work to make the data available to you. Can Scanners be "re-opened"? I don't believe so, once closed it is basically useless. should you just be closing Scanners (particularly, Scanners with files) and the end of each program? The OS will close any file your program has opened when it is closed. So you don't need to close every scanner. It is good practice to do so tho, since some things do not like to be abruptly closed by the OS (files are fine). And lastly, what's even the purpose of the Scanner class at all? Why do we need a class at all to get input? Does Java not have a Console.ReadLine() equivalent that we can just set to a String variable? Scanner is a convenience class to help read text input from different sources. If you only ever read string from the console you don't need it, but many program do more than that. More on reddit.com