Running “patch” without generating *.orig and *.rej files

Question

Is it possible to tell patch not to generate .orig and .rej files? I find it extremely annoying that patch creates these.

Answer 1

To tell patch not to produce backups just omit the -b and any --backup-... options.

To instruct it not to create .rej files add -r - option to the command.

Answer 2

If you're not giving any option to patch other than -pN, it only creates those files when a patch fails to apply cleanly.

So, one option is to stop creating (or accepting) bad patches. :)

Back in the real world, this is a feature. When patch(1) fails to apply a patch segment to the original file, it saves the temporary original file copy out durably as *.orig, dumps the rejected segment to *.rej, and continues trying to apply patch segments. The idea is that you can open the *.rej file and complete the patch process manually by copying bits and pieces over to the patched file. The *.orig file can also be useful when the patch process accidentally wrecks something, and you need to refer to the original version to fix it.

I don't always fix a bad patch with text from the *.rej and *.orig files, but it's nice to have them in case I need them.

Once I've fixed up a bad patch, I give this command at the project root to quickly clean things up:

$ find . \( -name \*.orig -o -name \*.rej \) -delete

I use it often enough that it stays in my Bash history. I find that Ctrl-R o r i is enough to find the command in my history.