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10.3 Applying Imperfect Patches
patch tries to skip any leading text in the patch file,
apply the diff, and then skip any trailing text. Thus you can feed a
mail message directly to patch, and it should work. If the
entire diff is indented by a constant amount of white space,
patch automatically ignores the indentation. If a context
diff contains trailing carriage return on each line, patch
automatically ignores the carriage return. If a context diff has been
encapsulated by prepending ‘- ’ to lines beginning with ‘-’
as per Internet RFC 934,
patch automatically unencapsulates the input.
However, certain other types of imperfect input require user intervention or testing.
| ISBN 0954161750 | Comparing and Merging Files with GNU diff and patch | See the print edition |