git am error: “patch does not apply”

Question

I am trying to move several commits from one project to the second, similar one, using git.

So I created a patch, containing 5 commits:

git format-patc         


        

Answer 1

This kind of error can be caused by LF vs CRLF line ending mismatches, e.g. when you're looking at the patch file and you're absolutely sure it should be able to apply, but it just won't.

To test this out, if you have a patch that applies to just one file, you can try running 'unix2dos' or 'dos2unix' on just that file (try both, to see which one causes the file to change; you can get these utilities for Windows as well as Unix), then commit that change as a test commit, then try applying the patch again. If that works, that was the problem.

NB git am applies patches as LF by default (even if the patch file contains CRLF), so if you want to apply CRLF patches to CRLF files you must use git am --keep-cr, as per this answer.