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Multiple Patches in a File

If the patch file contains more than one patch, and if you do not specify an input file on the command line, patch tries to apply each patch as if they came from separate patch files. This means that it determines the name of the file to patch for each patch, and that it examines the leading text before each patch for file names and prerequisite revision level (see Making Patches, for more on that topic).

patch uses the following rules to intuit a file name from the leading text before a patch. First, patch takes an ordered list of candidate file names as follows:

Then patch selects a file name from the candidate list as follows:

To determine the best of a nonempty list of file names, patch first takes all the names with the fewest path name components; of those, it then takes all the names with the shortest basename; of those, it then takes all the shortest names; finally, it takes the first remaining name.

See patch and POSIX, to see whether patch is conforming to POSIX.