diffutils: Imperfect
10.3 Applying Imperfect Patches
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'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
(ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc934.txt), 'patch' automatically
unencapsulates the input.
However, certain other types of imperfect input require user
intervention or testing.
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