Patch creation hints.

I have a mental block on how to create and apply a patch. I’m forever needing to go back to the man pages, which is frustrating.

Here are the commands which I use:

    diff -ruNx .svn olddir newdir > patch
    cd targetdir ; patch -p1 < ../patch

I run the diff from the comment parent directory of the two trees I wish to diff. The .svn parameter is the name of subdirectories I do not want included in the diff. (I use subversion, if you hadn’t guessed.) The -p1, on the patch command, causes the first component of the path (olddir/newdir) to be ignored.