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patch
patch
takes comparison output produced by diff
and applies
the differences to a copy of the original file, producing a patched
version. With patch
, you can distribute just the changes to a
set of files instead of distributing the entire file set; your
correspondents can apply patch
to update their copy of the files
with your changes. patch
automatically determines the diff
format, skips any leading or trailing headers, and uses the headers to
determine which file to patch. This lets your correspondents feed a
mail message containing a difference listing directly to
patch
.
patch
detects and warns about common problems like forward
patches. It saves any patches that it could not apply. It can also maintain a
patchlevel.h
file to ensure that your correspondents apply
diffs in the proper order.
patch
accepts a series of diffs in its standard input, usually
separated by headers that specify which file to patch. It applies
diff
hunks (see Hunks) one by one. If a hunk does not
exactly match the original file, patch
uses heuristics to try to
patch the file as well as it can. If no approximate match can be found,
patch
rejects the hunk and skips to the next hunk. patch
normally replaces each file f with its new version, putting reject
hunks (if any) into ‘f.rej’.
See Invoking patch, for detailed information on the options to
patch
.
• patch Input | Selecting the type of patch input.
| |
• Revision Control | Getting files from RCS, SCCS, etc. | |
• Imperfect | Dealing with imperfect patches. | |
• Creating and Removing | Creating and removing files with a patch. | |
• Patching Timestamps | Updating timestamps on patched files. | |
• Multiple Patches | Handling multiple patches in a file. | |
• patch Directories | Changing directory and stripping directories. | |
• Backups | Whether backup files are made. | |
• Backup Names | Backup file names. | |
• Reject Names | Reject file names. | |
• patch Messages | Messages and questions patch can produce.
| |
• patch and POSIX | Conformance to the POSIX standard. | |
• patch and Tradition | GNU versus traditional patch .
|
Next: Making Patches, Previous: Interactive Merging, Up: Top [Contents][Index]