Apply patch, exclude a specific folder

Question

I have a patch file for some software (Magento) and want to apply it to my current project.

The patch file contains also references to files in the var/packages folder which I do not want (I deleted this folder in my installation).

When applying this patch file (patch -p1 < the.patch), I get lots of warnings like:

The next patch would delete the file var/package/Foo_Bar.1.7.0.0.xml,
which does not exist!  Assume -R? [n] ^C

Is there any way to tell the patch command to just ignore patches for this folder?

Answer 1

You can use the “filterdiff” utility – http://man.cx/filterdiff – from http://packages.debian.org/patchutils to do that.

Otherwise, just pressing Enter a lot will also help ;-)

Answer 2

You can use filterdiff from the patchutils package.

-x *PATTERN*, --exclude=*PATTERN*

Exclude files matching PATTERN. All other lines in the input are displayed.

So for your example

filterdiff -p1 -x 'var/packages/*' < the.patch | patch -p1

Alternatively you can manually edit the patch to remove the unwanted files, but this make take some time if it's very large.