Hi,
Elad Eyal <elad_at_CS.bgu.ac.il> writes:
> Thank you, Thank you, Thank you! I am dust to your feet and ketchup to
> your burgers.
I like that one ;-)
> Precisely what I wanted. Now I no longer have a desktop, but
> _A_ desktop! Thank you veryveryvery much.
You are welcome; I am glad that you like the patch.
> PS: How on Earth is one supposed to use the patch you sent? I applied the
> changes manually, but what's the proper way to do it?
I think, somebody else already answered this question, but then, it
might have been on one of the other mailing lists that I am subscribed
to.
If you have two (or more) files that differ only slightly, it is
usually better to send the changes only, rather than the entire
files. In order to make this process more automatic, there is a
powerful tool called "diff". It will calculate a list of the
differences and output a description of what needs to be changed in
order to get from the old version of the file, to the new
version. This is what is called a patch file. There are different
output options (c.f. "man diff"), but context-style or unified patches
are most human-readable and also offer a couple of other technical
benefits.
In order to automatically apply patches, you need to run the patch
file thru the tool "patch". The nice thing about this tool is, that it
ignores all additional information that it might find in the input
file. Thus you can directly pipe the news article into "pipe" without
having to strip the extra text lines.
You should probably have a look at the man pages for "patch" if you
never used it before; but I will give you a few hints. "patch" always
works relative to the current directory. This might not be exactly the
same as the one that was used for creating the patch files with
"diff".
For instance, the patch file might have been created in the directory
"/usr/src"; then all "fvwm" related filenames will be preceded with
"fvwm-2.0.43". On the other hand, you might have stored your source
tree in "/usr/tmp/my-fvwm", thus the prefix "fvwm-2.0.43" does not
work for you. In this case, you change into the directory
"/usr/tmp/my-fvwm" and then tell "patch" to strip off the first part
of the path. You do this by passing the option "-p1". Actually, it is
a very good idea, to always use this option even when it might not
appear to be neccessary, because it has yet another side effect that
spares you some trouble. So just make it a rule, to always pass this
option; in most cases it will probably have the form "-p0", which
tells "patch" not to strip any part of the patch.
There are two other options that I use frequently. "-l" tells "patch"
to ignore difference in "white-space" (that is, different amounts of
space or tab characters); "-s" tells "patch" to not echo the contents
of the input file to the screen.
After you ran "patch", the original files still exist. They will have
been renamed, so that the suffix ".orig" is attached to the name. This
allows you to revert to the original version, if the patch did not
work. If for some reason there have been problems, then you will find
files that end in ".rej". These files contain patches that could not
be applied.
Good luck and let me know, if you need further information,
Markus
--
Markus Gutschke Internet: gutschk_at_math.uni-muenster.de
Schlage 5a
D-48268 Greven-Gimbte
Germany
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Received on Sat Dec 07 1996 - 21:07:02 GMT