On Thu, Feb 28, 2002 at 11:46 AM, John F Davis wrote: > Put another way, in your step 2.2, what is the implied > directory name used for the patch? What is the p1 or > p0 bit? Is that supposed to somehow strip the leading > directory name or something? Yes, the digit after the "-p" tells patch how many leading directory names to ignore. These are the directory names that are found inside the patch.file itself. Most kernel patches are designed to be used with "-p1" because it allows the author to have a completely bogus top level directory that labels what version is to be patched. For example, the top three lines of one of my patches: diff -urN -X dontdiff.txt linux-2.4.18-rc1/drivers/pci/pci.ids rc1-ml/drivers/pci/pci.ids --- linux-2.4.18-rc1/drivers/pci/pci.ids Fri Feb 15 14:24:19 2002 +++ rc1-ml/drivers/pci/pci.ids Fri Feb 15 14:49:07 2002 I would expect the user of the patch to execute patch in his top level source tree directory, perhaps named /usr/src/my-linux, with the -p1 specified so patch ignores the "linux-2.4.18-rc1" directory specified on the "---" line, and the "rc1-ml" directory specified on the "+++" line of my patch.file. Thus patch is looking for directory drivers/pci ... which it will find in its current directory, /usr/src/my-linux. The directory where patch will look for the file to be patched, pci.ids, is /usr/src/my-linux/drivers/pci. My leading directory name was chosen to inform the user that this patch was created from the version 2.4.18-rc1 kernel files. > When you issue that > command, are you in the parent directory which owns > the kernel directory to be patched or are you in the > directory to be patched? Is it clearer now? Patch ignores the leading directories that you tell it to ignore, and looks for the rest of the specified path in it's current directory. Best regards, ---------------------------------------------------------------- Ed Vance edv@macrolink.com Macrolink, Inc. 1500 N. Kellogg Dr Anaheim, CA 92807 ---------------------------------------------------------------- -- Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ IRC Channel: irc.openprojects.net / #kernelnewbies Web Page: http://www.kernelnewbies.org/
