Tribblix: manual page: combinediff.1

COMBINEDIFF(1) Man pages COMBINEDIFF(1)

NAME

combinediff - create a cumulative unified patch from two incremental
patches

SYNOPSIS

combinediff [[-p n] | [--strip-match=n]] [[-U n] | [--unified=n]]
[[-d PAT] | [--drop-context=PAT]] [[-q] | [--quiet]]
[[-z] | [--decompress]] [[-b] | [--ignore-space-change]]
[[-B] | [--ignore-blank-lines]] [[-i] | [--ignore-case]]
[[-w] | [--ignore-all-space]] [[--interpolate] |
[--combine]] diff1 diff2

combinediff {[--help] | [--version]}

DESCRIPTION

combinediff creates a unified diff that expresses the sum of two
diffs. The diff files must be listed in the order that they are to be
applied. For best results, the diffs must have at least three lines
of context.

Since combinediff doesn't have the advantage of being able to look at
the files that are to be modified, it has stricter requirements on
the input format than patch(1) does. The output of GNU diff will be
okay, even with extensions, but if you intend to use a hand-edited
patch it might be wise to clean up the offsets and counts using
recountdiff(1) first.

Note, however, that the two patches must be in strict incremental
order. In other words, the second patch must be relative to the state
of the original set of files after the first patch was applied.

The diffs may be in context format. The output, however, will be in
unified format.

OPTIONS

-p n, --strip-match=n
When comparing filenames, ignore the first n pathname components
from both patches. (This is similar to the -p option to GNU
patch(1).)

-q, --quiet
Quieter output. Don't emit rationale lines at the beginning of
each patch.

-U n, --unified=n
Attempt to display n lines of context (requires at least n lines
of context in both input files). (This is similar to the -U
option to GNU diff(1).)

-d pattern, --drop-context=PATTERN
Don't display any context on files that match the shell wildcard
pattern. This option can be given multiple times.

Note that the interpretation of the shell wildcard pattern does
not count slash characters or periods as special (in other words,
no flags are given to fnmatch). This is so that "*/basename"-type
patterns can be given without limiting the number of pathname
components.

-i, --ignore-case
Consider upper- and lower-case to be the same.

-w, --ignore-all-space
Ignore whitespace changes in patches.

-b, --ignore-space-change
Ignore changes in the amount of whitespace.

-B, --ignore-blank-lines
Ignore changes whose lines are all blank.

-z, --decompress
Decompress files with extensions .gz and .bz2.

--interpolate
Run as "interdiff". See interdiff(1) for more information about
how the behaviour is altered in this mode.

--combine
Run as "combinediff". This is the default.

--help
Display a short usage message.

--version
Display the version number of combinediff.

BUGS

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

AUTHOR