I recently ran into a similar issue as described here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24821431/git-apply-patch-fails-silently-no-errors-but-nothing-happens I was using the alias: alias ganw='git diff -U0 -w --no-color "$@" | git apply --cached --ignore-whitespace --unidiff-zero -' to stage non-whitespace changes, but I was not in the root directory and the changes were not being applied. I broke down the command to discover the 'git apply' part of the pipe was silently failing to apply anything, exiting 0 without even a warning. The exit status and lack of warning is terribly misleading, I imagine this would be the cause of subtle bugs in automated scripts. Is this expected behaviour? Thanks, Ernesto