diff --git a/hadoop-common-project/hadoop-common/CHANGES.txt b/hadoop-common-project/hadoop-common/CHANGES.txt
index 6392825cf8..66e0522c2c 100644
--- a/hadoop-common-project/hadoop-common/CHANGES.txt
+++ b/hadoop-common-project/hadoop-common/CHANGES.txt
@@ -784,6 +784,9 @@ Release 2.1.0-beta - 2013-07-02
     HADOOP-9678. TestRPC#testStopsAllThreads intermittently fails on Windows.
     (Ivan Mitic via cnauroth)
 
+    HADOOP-9681. FileUtil.unTarUsingJava() should close the InputStream upon
+    finishing. (Chuan Liu via cnauroth)
+
     HADOOP-9665. Fixed BlockDecompressorStream#decompress to return -1 rather
     than throw EOF at end of file. (Zhijie Shen via acmurthy)
 
diff --git a/hadoop-common-project/hadoop-common/src/main/java/org/apache/hadoop/fs/FileUtil.java b/hadoop-common-project/hadoop-common/src/main/java/org/apache/hadoop/fs/FileUtil.java
index cb216e96ef..afa7fa785e 100644
--- a/hadoop-common-project/hadoop-common/src/main/java/org/apache/hadoop/fs/FileUtil.java
+++ b/hadoop-common-project/hadoop-common/src/main/java/org/apache/hadoop/fs/FileUtil.java
@@ -662,18 +662,23 @@ private static void unTarUsingTar(File inFile, File untarDir,
   private static void unTarUsingJava(File inFile, File untarDir,
       boolean gzipped) throws IOException {
     InputStream inputStream = null;
-    if (gzipped) {
-      inputStream = new BufferedInputStream(new GZIPInputStream(
-          new FileInputStream(inFile)));
-    } else {
-      inputStream = new BufferedInputStream(new FileInputStream(inFile));
-    }
+    TarArchiveInputStream tis = null;
+    try {
+      if (gzipped) {
+        inputStream = new BufferedInputStream(new GZIPInputStream(
+            new FileInputStream(inFile)));
+      } else {
+        inputStream = new BufferedInputStream(new FileInputStream(inFile));
+      }
 
-    TarArchiveInputStream tis = new TarArchiveInputStream(inputStream);
+      tis = new TarArchiveInputStream(inputStream);
 
-    for (TarArchiveEntry entry = tis.getNextTarEntry(); entry != null;) {
-      unpackEntries(tis, entry, untarDir);
-      entry = tis.getNextTarEntry();
+      for (TarArchiveEntry entry = tis.getNextTarEntry(); entry != null;) {
+        unpackEntries(tis, entry, untarDir);
+        entry = tis.getNextTarEntry();
+      }
+    } finally {
+      IOUtils.cleanup(LOG, tis, inputStream);
     }
   }