Reputation: 525

Error when trying to apply git diff, "No valid patches in input"

I'm creating a powershell script with the goal of going through several git branches, saving a patch of the working changes, switching to the trunk branch to pull remote commits, then switching back to the working branch and reapplying the working changes.

Here is the method I am testing specifically:

git diff > test.patch
git restore .
*do main branch operation*
git apply test.patch

However when I try to apply the patch that I have just created I get an error:

error: No valid patches in input (allow with "--allow-empty")

Does anyone see what I'm doing wrong here?

Git version: 2.35.2.windows.1

Powershell version: 5.1.19041.1320

Upvotes: 21

Answers (6)

Branimir Ričko

Reputation: 151

Just run "dos2unix your_patch.patch" on your patch file and it should work after. dos2unix should be available on all distros.

Upvotes: 1

Adji_PA

Reputation: 401

I have the same problem as well when applying the patch. When I opened the patch, I got the patch with UTF-16 LE BOM encoding. Quite likely this was the problem.

So instead of using

# don't do this
git diff > myoldpatch.patch

for creating the patch of unsaved changes, using Powershell, you do this instead (thanks benf!)

git diff | Set-Content -Encoding utf8 .\goodutf8.patch

PS. tried in git 2.42

Upvotes: 17

pauljobs weng

Reputation: 121

I also had the same problem, but I got it solved, use Notepad to open the patch file, select UTF-8 in the code selection, then save it, and then use git apply patch to enter the patch

Upvotes: 12