Regarding Patching

[anu66]

Dear All,

Can Any one give some info regarding what are the patching and how to add or delete the patches.


Regards,
Sri Anu.

[hazel]

Patching is simply a way of making small modifications in large files. Suppose you have written a program and distributed it publicly and then you find and fix a bug in it. Now you have a new version of the program. In principle you could simply make this available as a complete file, but everyone will save on download bandwidth if you simply distribute a small file containing the differences between the old and the new versions. This is called a patch.

You make a patch by running the diff command on the two versions and directing the output into a file. Then each user of your program can use the patch command on the old version (which they already have) and the patch file which you have made available.

[oz]

You can run man patch from the command line for lots of good information on using the patch command, and a quick google search will reveal a number of easy to understand linux patch howto articles.