I'm glad to announce that finally, support for git-style diffs is working well enough, and no more major issues seem to be in our way before the next stable release of GNU patch. Some things have changed significantly recently in order to get the code release ready, so now would be a really great time for an extra round of testing. You can find the latest snapshot here: ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/patch/ The last stable release dates back to December 2009 with version 2.6.1. The following significant changes have happened since then: * Support for most features of the "diff --git" format, including renames and copies, permission changes, and symlink diffs. Binary diffs are not supported yet; patch will complain and skip them. * Support for double-quoted filenames in the "diff --git" format: when a filename starts with a double quote, it is interpreted as a C string literal. The escape sequences \\, \", \a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t, \v, and \ooo (a three-digit octal number between 0 and 255) are recognized. * Patch now ignores destination file names that are absolute or that contain a component of "..". This addresses CVE-2010-4651. * Refuse to apply a normal patch to a symlink. (Previous versions of patch were replacing the symlink with a regular file.) * When trying to modify a read-only file, warn about the potential problem by default. The --read-only command line option allows to change this behavior. * Files that should be deleted are now deleted once the entire patch file has been read. This fixes a bug with numbered backup files. * When a timestamp specifies a time zone, honor that instead of assuming the local time zone (--set-date) or Universal Coordinated Time (--set-utc). * Support for nanosecond precision timestamps. * Many portability and bug fixes. Please report bugs or suggestions on the <bug-patch@xxxxxxx> mailing list, or in the project's bug tracker on Savannah: http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/patch Thanks, Andreas -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html