On Sat, 15 Nov 2003, Christopher K. Johnson wrote: > Single character options can be stacked. > So just as one can do > ls -l -r > or > ls -lr > one can combine the "patch -f -o" as "patch -fo". > > And if you look you will find there is a newly created file named "rce" > which contains the patched output. That is because the -o option takes > a following token as the output file, so "patch -force" is the same as > "patch -f -o rce" > > There was no error because you specified valid, albeit undesirable, options. you're right, of course. this was one of those moments of picking *just* the right combination of wrong options that would cause me grief. what i got was the equivalent of -f = --force -o rce = output file of "rce" so all my changes were being placed in the file "rce", none of the actual files were being updated, and the output looked like a perfectly normal patch operation so i never suspected something else was happening. sigh. rday
