Ubuntu Manpage: combinediff - create a cumulative unified patch from two incremental patches

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