ok, i take it back -- i *am* still confused by patch -force

[Robert P. J. Day]

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