git-apply - Apply patch on a git index file and a work tree

git-apply [--stat] [--numstat] [--summary] [--check] [--index] [--apply]
          [--no-add] [--index-info] [--allow-binary-replacement] [-z]
          [<patch>...]

Reads supplied diff output and applies it on a git index file and a work tree.

<patch>...

The files to read patch from. - can be used to read from the standard input.

--stat

Instead of applying the patch, output diffstat for the input. Turns off "apply".

--numstat

Similar to --stat, but shows number of added and deleted lines in decimal notation and pathname without abbreviation, to make it more machine friendly. Turns off "apply".

--summary

Instead of applying the patch, output a condensed summary of information obtained from git diff extended headers, such as creations, renames and mode changes. Turns off "apply".

--check

Instead of applying the patch, see if the patch is applicable to the current work tree and/or the index file and detects errors. Turns off "apply".

--index

When --check is in effect, or when applying the patch (which is the default when none of the options that disables it is in effect), make sure the patch is applicable to what the current index file records. If the file to be patched in the work tree is not up-to-date, it is flagged as an error. This flag also causes the index file to be updated.

--index-info

Newer git-diff output has embedded index information for each blob to help identify the original version that the patch applies to. When this flag is given, and if the original version of the blob is available locally, outputs information about them to the standard output.

-z

When showing the index information, do not munge paths, but use NUL terminated machine readable format. Without this flag, the pathnames output will have TAB, LF, and backslash characters replaced with \t, \n, and \\, respectively.

--apply

If you use any of the options marked &#8220;Turns off "apply"&#8221; above, git-apply reads and outputs the information you asked without actually applying the patch. Give this flag after those flags to also apply the patch.

--no-add

When applying a patch, ignore additions made by the patch. This can be used to extract common part between two files by first running diff on them and applying the result with this option, which would apply the deletion part but not addition part.

--allow-binary-replacement

When applying a patch, which is a git-enhanced patch that was prepared to record the pre- and post-image object name in full, and the path being patched exactly matches the object the patch applies to (i.e. "index" line's pre-image object name is what is in the working tree), and the post-image object is available in the object database, use the post-image object as the patch result. This allows binary files to be patched in a very limited way.

Written by Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

Documentation by Junio C Hamano

Part of the git(7) suite