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2021-05-17 - patch stuff

for work today i had to make identical changes to 2 separate branches. the problem is that one branch moved all the files i was changing to a different directory. i knew this could be solved with the patch command, but i didn't know exactly how. now i know how.

one think i learned is that the git diff format is the same format as diff, so it works with the patch command. i guess that should be common sense, but it wasn't something i actually knew for certain before. the next thing i learned was about the patch command, specifically the -l and -p options. -p lets you pass a number that will remove leading directories specified in the patch file. git diff always puts a leading a/ and b/ directory on the diff, so i needed to pass a -p1. the -l command ignores whitespace. i thought -l would take care of carriage returns too, but it didn't, so i had to pipe the git diff output through dos2usix too.

the end result is something that looked like this:

git diff   | dos2unix | patch -lp1

yep. that's what i learned today.