In my case, there is a directory of files that anyone can download from the web. I have taken that directory and made changes to it, and want to create a patch file such that others can apply it to the downloaded directory to reproduce exactly what I have in my modified directory. I just had this same problem - lots of advice on how to half do it. Well, here is what I did to get both the patching and unpatching to work:. I needed to create a patch file and send it to someone so they could update their directory to match mine.
There are many caveats with diff and patch however, so it ended up taking me hours to figure out something so conceptually simple. Absolute paths seem to be preferred over relative paths, and many of the options seem to have evolved from niche use cases. I finally figured out a solution based on David H's answer , with additional tips from Lakshmanan Ganapathy :. It does exactly what you described. It builds per-file diff using xdelta library and puts it to archive package.
You can redistribute that package and apply the difference. There are binaries for Win Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group.
Create a free Team What is Teams? Collectives on Stack Overflow. Learn more. How to create a patch for a whole directory to update it? Ask Question. Asked 9 years, 9 months ago. Active 3 years, 5 months ago. Viewed 93k times. What do I need to tell the other person with respect to how to apply my patch? Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Alois Mahdal 9, 6 6 gold badges 49 49 silver badges 68 68 bronze badges.
David H David H Wish I could shake your hand. Thanks so much! I'm a mac guy so no idea. What you have to do is check the options for patch and diff on Cygwin. By following those instructions, the changes in the modified file are replicated in the original file. Now imagine that process happening to an entire directory of text files. All in one go. All you get sent is the patch file. Why send dozens of files round when you can send one file, or post one file for easy download?
What do you do with the patch file to actually patch your files? The patch command is most often used by people working with software source code files, but it works equally well with any set of text files whatever their purpose, source code or not.
In this scenario, we are in a directory called work which contains two other directories. One is called working, and the other one is called latest. The working directory holds a set of source code files.
The latest directory holds the most recent version of those source code files, some of which have been modified. To be safe, the working directory is a copy of the current version of the text files. The diff command finds the differences between two files. Its default action is to list the modified lines in the terminal window. One file is called slang. The -u unified option tells diff to also list some of the un-modified text lines from before and after each of the changed sections.
These lines are called context lines. They help the patch command locate precisely where a change must be made in the original file. We provide the names of the files so that diff knows which files to compare. The original file is listed first, then the modified file. This is the command we issue to diff :. If the files were identical, there would be no output listed at all. Seeing this type of output from diff confirms that there are differences between the two file versions and that the original file needs patching.
To capture those differences in a patch file, use the following command. The name of the patch file is arbitrary. You can call it anything you like. The -u unified option lets patch know that the patch file contains unified context lines. In other words, we used the -u option with diff, so we use the -u option with patch.
We can instruct patch to make a backup copy of patched files before they are changed by using the -b backup option. The -i input option tells patch the name of the patch file to use:. The file is patched as before, with no visible difference in the output. The date and time stamps of the files show that slang. We can use diff to create a patch file that contains all of the differences between the files in two directories.
We can then use that patch file with patch to have those differences applied to the files in the working folder with a single command. The -N option tells diff how to handle files in the latest directory that are not in the working directory. It forces diff to put instructions in the patch file so that patch creates files that are present in the latest directory but missing from the working directory.
Scrolling further down through the patch file, we see that it then describes the changes in another file called structs. This verifies that the patch file definitely contains the differences between different versions of multiple files.
The --dry-run option tells patch to do everything apart from actually modifying the files. Either way, no files are modified. If no problems are reported, we can repeat the command without the --dry-run option and confidently patch our files.
Out of the entire directory, diff found two files to patch. The instructions regarding the modifications for those two files have been checked by patch , and no problems have been reported. To genuinely apply the patches to the files we use the previous command without the --dry-run option.
And no problems are reported. This is by far the easiest and safest way to use patch. Copy your target files to a folder and patch that folder.
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