HP-UX Reference (11i v3 07/02) - 1 User Commands N-Z (vol 2)

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100

patch(1) patch(1)

1 One or more lines were written to a reject ﬁle.

>1 An error occurred.

For the non-UNIX Standard version, exit values vary as follows:

0 Successful completion or one or more lines were written to a reject ﬁle.

1 An error occurred.

DIAGNOSTICS

Most error messages indicate that patch could not parse your patch ﬁle.

The message Hmm... indicates that there is unprocessed text in the patch ﬁle and that

patch is attempt-

ing to intuit whether there is a patch in that text and, if so, what kind of patch it is.

Note that only few diagnostic messages are printed for the UNIX Standard version, because it does not sup-

port the verbose option.

WARNINGS

patch cannot tell if the line numbers are off in an ed script, and can only detect bad line numbers in a

normal diff when it ﬁnds a change or a delete command. A context diff using fuzz factor 3 may have the

same problem. Until a suitable interactive interface is added, you should probably do a context diff in these

cases to see if the changes made sense. Of course, compiling without errors is a pretty good indication that

the patch worked, but not always.

patch usually produces the correct results, even when it has to do a lot of guessing. However, the results

are guaranteed to be correct only when the patch is applied to exactly the same version of the ﬁle that the

patch was generated from.

The result obtained from the UNIX Standard options -c, -e, and -n

, which force the patch command to

interpret the diff ﬁle either as a context diff or as an

script or as a normal diff respectively, is

unspeciﬁed. For example, if one forces the patch command to treat the context diff ﬁle as an

ed script, the

result is unspeciﬁed. The same is true if one forces patch to treat an

ed script as a context ﬁle and so on..

When a diff is forced with the above options, the diff ﬁle is searched for patterns that are speciﬁc to that

type of diff ﬁle. If the diff ﬁle is not what was speciﬁed by the option, the ﬁle is checked for

ed commands.

ed commands are present in the diff ﬁle, then the ﬁle is assumed to be an

ed_diff ﬁle and the patch

proceeds.

patch could be smarter about partial matches, excessively deviant offsets and swapped code, but that

would take an extra pass.

If code has been duplicated (for instance with #ifdef OLDCODE...#else...#endif), patch

is incapa-

ble of patching both versions, and, if it works at all, will likely patch the wrong one, and tell you that it suc-

ceeded.

If you apply a patch that you have already applied,

patch will think it is a reversed patch, and offer to

un-apply the patch. This could be construed as a feature.

UNIX Standard version: If you are using multiple patches for different ﬁles, group patches that have to be

applied to a single ﬁle. Otherwise, intermediate versions of the previous patches of a ﬁle will not be used

for the current patch.

FILES

/var/tmp/patch*