How-To Apply a diff

[awt586]

The Fedora Bible and online research has produced little to nothing on the subject of how to apply a patch or .diff file. Can anyone provide a couple of steps or procedure in how to do this?

Seems this is something overlooked across the board regardless of distro. How to install from an rpm, deb or source is pretty well documented but the diff's are - well..... being mysterious.

Thanks
T

[markkuk]

Use the patch command. See "man patch" for details.

[awt586]

Already done that but this is cryptic at best.

What does
NAME
patch - apply a diff file to an original

SYNOPSIS
patch [options] [originalfile [patchfile]]

but usually just

patch -pnum <patchfile

tell me about the price of eggs in China? To explain is one thing but an example would lend a great deal to completing the dialog and enhance if not improve the comprehension factor here.

I'm trying to apply a diff patch from the ivtv source for mplayer to provide a tv or viewing capability for /dev/video0 which is my video capture card (Hauppauge PVR-150). I don't want to go through setting up MythTV just to watch TV. It's ludicrous. To simply view this shouldn't be such a chore when apps like TVTime, XAWTV are available but only for BTTV types of devices not one's such as mine or many others. DVB cards have the capabilities like BTTV but not MPEG cards which are the majority. So.....

Without sounding rude; thanks but no thanks. You didn't answer my question.

[jcliburn]

It's been awhile since I tried it, but mplayer should already play from /dev/video0. Does this not work for you?

mplayer -vo xv /dev/video0

(I might not quite understand what you're trying to do though...)

Don't know what else to tell you about applying a patch; Markku's recommendation is spot on. The value for -p is the most important thing to worry about, and the -p value you use depends upon how your diff file was created. Sometimes you can navigate to the directory of the file to be patched and execute:

patch -p1 < /path/to/patchfile

But this assumes your patchfile was created in such a way that the use of -p1 is appropriate. Sorry, but the manpage is your best bet. Focus on the -p explanation and look at the first few lines of your .diff file to see which -p num you need to use.