Man pages sections > man1 > flipdiff

flipdiff - exchange the order of two incremental patches



flipdiff - exchange the order of two incremental patches


flipdiff {[--help] | [--version]}


flipdiff exchanges the order of two patch files that apply one after the other. The patches must be “clean”: the context lines must match and there should be no mis-matched offsets.
The swapped patches are sent to standard output, with a marker line (“=== 8< === cut here === 8< ===”) between them, unless the --in-place option is passed. In that case, the output is written back to the original input files.


-p n, --strip-match=n
-q, --quiet
-U n, --unified=n
-d pattern, --drop-context=PATTERN
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.
Write output to the original input files.
Display a short usage message.
Display the version number of flipdiff.


This is only been very lightly tested, and may not even work. Using --in-place is not recommended at the moment.
There are some cases in which it is not possible to meaningfully flip patches without understanding the semantics of the content. This program only uses complete lines that appear at some stage during the application of the two patches, and never composes a line from parts.
Because of this, it is generally a good idea to read through the output to check that it makes sense.


Tim Waugh <>
Package maintainer
23 January 2009 patchutils