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

I had the same problem. I had used

git format-patch <commit_hash>

to create the patch. My main problem was patch was failing due to some conflicts, but I could not see any merge conflict in the file content. I had used git am --3way <patch_file_path> to apply the patch.

The correct command to apply the patch should be:

git am --3way --ignore-space-change <patch_file_path>

If you execute the above command for patching, it will create a merge conflict if patch apply fails. Then you can fix the conflict in your files, like the same way merge conflicts are resolved for git merge

Answer 2

What is a patch?

A patch is little more (see below) than a series of instructions: "add this here", "remove that there", "change this third thing to a fourth". That's why git tells you:

The copy of the patch that failed is found in:
c:/.../project2/.git/rebase-apply/patch

You can open that patch in your favorite viewer or editor, open the files-to-be-changed in your favorite editor, and "hand apply" the patch, using what you know (and git does not) to figure out how "add this here" is to be done when the files-to-be-changed now look little or nothing like what they did when they were changed earlier, with those changes delivered to you as a patch.

A little more

A three-way merge introduces that "little more" information than the plain "series of instructions": it tells you what the original version of the file was as well. If your repository has the original version, your git can compare what you did to a file, to what the patch says to do to the file.

As you saw above, if you request the three-way merge, git can't find the "original version" in the other repository, so it can't even attempt the three-way merge. As a result you get no conflict markers, and you must do the patch-application by hand.

Using --reject

When you have to apply the patch by hand, it's still possible that git can apply most of the patch for you automatically and leave only a few pieces to the entity with the ability to reason about the code (or whatever it is that needs patching). Adding --reject tells git to do that, and leave the "inapplicable" parts of the patch in rejection files. If you use this option, you must still hand-apply each failing patch, and figure out what to do with the rejected portions.

Once you have made the required changes, you can git add the modified files and use git am --continue to tell git to commit the changes and move on to the next patch.

What if there's nothing to do?

Since we don't have your code, I can't tell if this is the case, but sometimes, you wind up with one of the patches saying things that amount to, e.g., "fix the spelling of a word on line 42" when the spelling there was already fixed.

In this particular case, you, having looked at the patch and the current code, should say to yourself: "aha, this patch should just be skipped entirely!" That's when you use the other advice git already printed:

If you prefer to skip this patch, run "git am --skip" instead.

If you run git am --skip, git will skip over that patch, so that if there were five patches in the mailbox, it will end up adding just four commits, instead of five (or three instead of five if you skip twice, and so on).

Answer 3

I had this error, was able to overcome it by using : patch -p1 < example.patch

I took it from here: https://www.drupal.org/node/1129120

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

Had several modules complain about patch does not apply. One thing I was missing out was that the branches had become stale. After the git merge master generated the patch files using git diff master BRANCH > file.patch. Going to the vanilla branch was able to apply the patch with git apply file.patch

Answer 6

I faced same error. I reverted the commit version while creating patch. it worked as earlier patch was in reverse way.

[mrdubey@SNF]$ git log 65f1d63 commit 65f1d6396315853f2b7070e0e6d99b116ba2b018 Author: Dubey Mritunjaykumar

Date: Tue Jan 22 12:10:50 2019 +0530

commit e377ab50081e3a8515a75a3f757d7c5c98a975c6 Author: Dubey Mritunjaykumar Date: Mon Jan 21 23:05:48 2019 +0530

Earlier commad used: git diff new_commit_id..prev_commit_id > 1 diff

Got error: patch failed: filename:40

working one: git diff prev_commit_id..latest_commit_id > 1.diff