Can I get a patch-compatible output from git-diff

Question

I am doing something very simple wrong   I m trying to prepare an ordinary patch file  so I can reapply some changes     git diff  gt  before   git diff something here  gt  save patch   git checkout      patch  lt  save patch   git diff  gt  after   diff before after     With something here blank it almost works  but the file names aren t right   I think I m just I m missing some option   In real life  I am going to do a merge after the checkout  so the patch might fail there  but you see what I m getting at    Edit My fault here for asking the wrong question   The actual question is  I want to save my changes away  do a merge  then re-apply the changes  if possible   I asked it the wrong way because I am used to using patch to solve these sorts of problems and git diff looked like that s what it wanted me to do   Charles Bailey s comment had the right answer   For me  git-apply is the right thing to do  git-stash looks more heavy-weight than I need and rebasing and bundles is definitely beyond my current skill level    I m going to accept the answer Charles gave  because you can t accept a comment    Thanks for all the suggestions   Edit  6 years later As anyone familiar with the subject knows  I over-estimated the difficulty of git stash   Pretty much every day or so  I will use the following sequence     git stash   git merge   git stash pop

User · Answer

The git diffs have an extra path segment prepended to the file paths  You can strip the this entry in the path by specifying -p1 with patch  like so   patch -p1  lt  save patch

User · Answer

A useful trick to avoid creating temporary patch files   git diff   patch -p1 -d  dst-dir

User · Answer

If you want to use patch you need to remove the a  b  prefixes that git uses by default  You can do this with the --no-prefix option  you can also do this with patch s -p option    git diff --no-prefix   lt other git-diff arguments gt     Usually though  it is easier to use straight git diff and then use the output to feed to git apply   Most of the time I try to avoid using textual patches  Usually one or more of temporary commits combined with rebase  git stash and bundles are easier to manage   For your use case I think that stash is most appropriate     save uncommitted changes git stash    do a merge or some other operation git merge some-branch    re-apply changes  removing stash if successful    you may be asked to resolve conflicts   git stash pop

User · Answer

Just use -p1  you will need to use -p0 in the --no-prefix case anyway  so you can just leave out the --no-prefix and use -p1     git diff  gt  save patch   patch -p1  lt  save patch    git diff --no-prefix  gt  save patch   patch -p0  lt  save patch

User · Answer

I save the diff of the current directory  including uncommitted files  against the current HEAD  Then you can transport the save patch file to wherever  including binary files   On your target machine  apply the patch using git apply  lt file gt       Note  it diff s the currently staged files too      git diff --binary --staged HEAD  gt  save patch   git reset --hard    lt transport it gt    git apply save patch

[git] Can I get a patch-compatible output from git-diff?

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