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In order to apply a Git patch file, use the “git am” command and specify the Git patch file to be used. Referring to our previous example, make sure to check out to the branch where you want your patch file to be applied.
The git commit command captures a snapshot of the project's currently staged changes. Committed snapshots can be thought of as “safe” versions of a project—Git will never change them unless you explicitly ask it to.
A patch is usually skipped when the changes it contains were already applied in the past. There are many possible reasons for this: a merge, a cherry-pick, changes operated manually or using another patch etc.
GIT patch or GIT diff is used to share the changes made by you to others without pushing it to main branch of the repository. This way other people can check your changes from the GIT patch file you made and suggest the necessary corrections.
Both the input and output are different:
git apply takes a patch (e.g. the output of git diff) and applies it to the working directory (or index, if --index or --cached is used).git am takes a mailbox of commits formatted as an email messages (e.g. the output of git format-patch) and applies them to the current branch.git am uses git apply behind the scenes, but does more work before (reading a Maildir or mbox, and parsing email messages) and after (creating commits).
git apply is for applying straight diffs (e.g. from git diff) whereas git am is for applying patches and sequences of patches from emails, either mbox or Maildir format and is the "opposite" of git format-patch. git am tries to extract commit messages and author details from email messages which is why it can make commits.
With git am you apply the patch so when you run git status you won't see any local changes, but git log will show the patch have been committed to the source code.
But with git apply you make the changes in the source files as if you were writing the code yourself, consequently git status and git diff will output the changes appeared in the patch you applied. Hence with git apply you can fix/add more changes and git add them together as a single new patch.
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