Re: [bug-patch] patch fails to give notice that it is being ran in 'dry-run' mode at any level of verbosity.

[Andreas Grünbacher]

Mike,

Am 13. Januar 2012 04:49 schrieb Mike Hodson <address@hidden>:
> I belive that the console output of 'patch' when in 'dry-run' mode should
> actually notify of this and explicitly mention that no files will be written
> or modified.

at the moment, patch will output something like this for rejects, with as well
as without --dry-run:

        patching file f
        Hunk #1 FAILED at 2.
        1 out of 1 hunk FAILED -- saving rejects to file f.rej

I definitely agree that patch should not say "saving rejects to file"
if it does not
in fact create any reject files -- this is just stupid. Something like
this might be
better in --dry-run mode:

        checking file f
        Hunk #1 FAILED at 2.
        1 out of 1 hunk FAILED

The big question is how many tools this change will break.

What do others on this list think?

Thanks,
Andreas