Manual: flipdiff

FLIPDIFF(1)					  Man pages					 FLIPDIFF(1)

NAME
       flipdiff - exchange the order of two incremental patches

SYNOPSIS

       flipdiff [[-p n] | [--strip-match=n]] [[-U n] | [--unified=n]] [[-d PAT] | [--drop-context=PAT]]
		[[-q] | [--quiet]] [[-z] | [--decompress]] [[-b] | [--ignore-space-change]] [[-B] |
		[--ignore-blank-lines]] [[-i] | [--ignore-case]] [[-w] | [--ignore-all-space]]
		[--color=WHEN] [--in-place] diff1 diff2

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

DESCRIPTION
       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.

OPTIONS
       -p n, --strip-match=n
	   When comparing filenames, ignore the first n pathname components from both patches. (This is
	   similar to the -p option to GNU patch(1).) If this option is not specified, flipdiff will
	   automatically determine the optimal number of path components to strip by finding the smallest
	   value where at least one file matches between the two patches.

       -q, --quiet
	   Quieter output. Don't emit rationale lines at the beginning of each patch.

       -U n, --unified=n
	   Attempt to display n lines of context (requires at least n lines of context in both input files).
	   (This is similar to the -U option to GNU diff(1).)

       -d pattern, --drop-context=PATTERN
	   Don't display any context on files that match the shell wildcard pattern. This option can be
	   given multiple times.

	   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. Also makes patch application ignore whitespace when
	   reconstructing files.

       -b, --ignore-space-change
	   Ignore changes in the amount of whitespace.

       -B, --ignore-blank-lines
	   Ignore changes whose lines are all blank.

       --color=WHEN
	   colorize the output; WHEN can be 'never', 'always', or 'auto' (default: auto, use 'never' to
	   disable)

       -z, --decompress
	   Decompress files with extensions .gz and .bz2.

       --in-place
	   Write output to the original input files.

       --help
	   Display a short usage message.

       --version
	   Display the version number of flipdiff.

LIMITATIONS
       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.

AUTHOR
       Tim Waugh 
	   Package maintainer

patchutils				       23 January 2009					 FLIPDIFF(1)