1COMBINEDIFF(1)                     Man pages                    COMBINEDIFF(1)
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NAME

6       combinediff - create a cumulative unified patch from two incremental
7       patches
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SYNOPSIS

10       combinediff [-p n] [-U n] [-d PAT] [-Bbiqwz] [[--interpolate]
11                   [--combine]] diff1 diff2
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13       combinediff {[--help] [--version]}
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DESCRIPTION

16       combinediff creates a unified diff that expresses the sum of two diffs.
17       The diff files must be listed in the order that they are to be applied.
18       For best results, the diffs must have at least three lines of context.
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20       Since combinediff doesn't have the advantage of being able to look at
21       the files that are to be modified, it has stricter requirements on the
22       input format than patch(1) does. The output of GNU diff will be okay,
23       even with extensions, but if you intend to use a hand-edited patch it
24       might be wise to clean up the offsets and counts using recountdiff(1)
25       first.
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27       Note, however, that the two patches must be in strict incremental
28       order. In other words, the second patch must be relative to the state
29       of the original set of files after the first patch was applied.
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31       The diffs may be in context format. The output, however, will be in
32       unified format.
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OPTIONS

35       -p n   When comparing filenames, ignore the first n pathname components
36              from both patches. (This is similar to the -p option to GNU
37              patch(1).)
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39       -q     Quieter output. Don't emit rationale lines at the beginning of
40              each patch.
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42       -U n   Attempt to display n lines of context (requires at least n lines
43              of context in both input files). (This is similar to the -U
44              option to GNU diff(1).)
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46       -d pattern
47              Don't display any context on files that match the shell wildcard
48              pattern. This option can be given multiple times.
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50              Note that the interpretation of the shell wildcard pattern does
51              not count slash characters or periods as special (in other
52              words, no flags are given to fnmatch). This is so that
53              “*/basename”-type patterns can be given without limiting the
54              number of pathname components.
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56       -i     Consider upper- and lower-case to be the same.
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58       -w     Ignore whitespace changes in patches.
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60       -b     Ignore changes in the amount of whitespace.
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62       -B     Ignore changes whose lines are all blank.
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64       -z     Decompress files with extensions .gz and .bz2.
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66       --interpolate
67              Run as “interdiff”. See interdiff(1) for more information about
68              how the behaviour is altered in this mode.
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70       --combine
71              Run as “combinediff”. This is the default.
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73       --help Display a short usage message.
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75       --version
76              Display the version number of combinediff.
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BUGS

79       The -U option is a bit erratic: it can control the amount of context
80       displayed for files that are modified in both patches, but not for
81       files that only appear in one patch (which appear with the same amount
82       of context in the output as in the input).
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SEE ALSO

85       interdiff(1)
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AUTHOR

88       Tim Waugh <twaugh@redhat.com>.
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92patchutils                        7 Jul 2003                    COMBINEDIFF(1)