Applying Patches with Changed White Space

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Applying Patches with Changed White Space

Sometimes mailers, editors, or other programs change spaces into tabs, or vice versa. If this happens to a patch file or an input file, the files might look the same, but patch will not be able to match them properly. If this problem occurs, use the '-l' or'--ignore-white-space' option, which makes patch compare white space loosely so that any sequence of white space in the patch file matches any sequence of whitespace in the input files. Non-whitespace characters must still match exactly. Each line of the context must still match a line in the input file. See also Applying Reversed Patches and Helping patch Find Inexact Matches for more details.