Unified diff patch

Viewed 3k times. Russell Russell Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. They are awesome links!!!! Thanks sooo much! I don't know how they didn't show up in Google — Russell. I normally use google to search SO: "searchwords site:stackoverflow. This is an old, old question, but I'm looking for this functionality too. And like the OP, I'd prefer something that produces a GNU diff formatted file, and as far as I can see neither of the programs you mention does that.

So what do you want me to do about that in a seven year old question? CreateDirectory Path. Start " ; File. So, for the old file, it applies to 6 lines, vs 8 for the new file. But it turns out that new file is not changed ,is that by design? FreeMemory FreeMemory 8, 7 7 gold badges 34 34 silver badges 48 48 bronze badges.

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When you want to see the difference between the source code before and after a certain commit, or between many commits, you can use a tool to show us diffs, or differences. If you are developing software using this same source code control tool, Git, you may have changes in your local system that you want to provide for others to potentially add as commits to their own tree.

This lets others patch their tree and see the source code tree with your changes applied. This model of sharing patch files is how the Linux kernel community operates regarding proposed changes today. It is outside of the scope of this article to discuss Git, the source code control system written by Linus Torvalds, in more detail, but it's worth noting that Git enables this distributed development model, allowing patches to live separately from a main repository, pushing and pulling into different trees and following their specific development flow.

Given its name, you can probably guess that GitHub is based on Git, but it offers a web- and API-based workflow around the Git tool for distributed open source project development. One of the main ways that patches are shared in GitHub is not via email, like the Linux kernel, but by creating a pull request. When you commit changes on your own copy of a source code tree, you can share those changes by creating a pull request against a commonly shared repository for that software project.

In the GitHub world, users tend to use the web-based interface to review the diffs or patches that comprise a pull request, but you can still access the raw patch files and use them at the command line with the patch utility. The first example includes two copies of a source tree, and one has changes that we want to visualize using the diff utility. Check the diff manual page for more information on options and ways to produce differences. The original source code is located in sources-orig and our second, modified codebase is located in a directory named sources-fixed.

To show the differences in a unified diff format in your terminal, use the following command:. If you want someone else to test the changes from this tree, you could save this output from diff into a patch file:.

Now you have a patch file, myfixes. A fellow developer can apply the changes using the patch tool, given that their current working directory is in the base of the source code tree:.