[Novalug] diff metadata

Aaron M. Ucko amu@alum.mit.edu
Mon Jan 5 16:58:33 EST 2015


John Franklin via Novalug <novalug@firemountain.net> writes:

> AIUI, patch is looking for the first line that starts with "index" or "---" to signal the start of a patch.  Checkout any git-managed project and type "git show HEAD", you'll see an example of a comment followed by a patch.  I'm 90% certain that patch will ignore the first part.

Indeed, patch makes a point of ignoring anything that doesn't look like
actual patch material:

   patch  tries to skip any leading garbage, apply the diff, and then skip
   any trailing garbage.  Thus you could feed an article or  message  con-
   taining  a  diff  listing  to patch, and it should work. [...]

-- 
Aaron M. Ucko, KB1CJC (amu at alum.mit.edu, ucko at debian.org)
http://www.mit.edu/~amu/ | http://stuff.mit.edu/cgi/finger/?amu@monk.mit.edu



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