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I don’t think GNU patch shares history with Larry Wall’s original. https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Patch seems to say so: ”GNU version of Larry Wall's program that takes "diff's" output and applies it to an original file to generate a modified version of that file”

I tried to verify by looking at their git repo, but that stops at “Import of patch-2.1.tar.gz” (https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/patch.git/log/?ofs=450)

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Nope. GNU Patch definitely is based on Larry's patch. But this bug is known since shar's need to workaround it. It's just that the GNU patch had that fixed very early on, BSD and probably others not. So shar still had to use the workaround.

Shar's workaround is for leading white space. This is change is for not assuming traling newlines.

It absolutely shared history with Larry Wall's patch.... It took the 2.0 sources and started improving them. I ran across a blurb about this somewhere. Also, the code structure is clearly derivative: variable names, function names, wording of messages.

> I don’t think GNU patch shares history with Larry Wall’s original.

Seems extremely unlikely to me that someone would independently write that if statement almost identically, with the same comment. These are very clearly descended from the same source.

... in a function having the same name, with a goto to an identical label name, and an error message string literal with exactly the same text, all in a file also named pch.c ...

Well, trivially:

    $ patch --version
    GNU patch 2.7.6
    Copyright (C) 2003, 2009-2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
    Copyright (C) 1988 Larry Wall

    License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
    This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
    There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

    Written by Larry Wall and Paul Eggert

But also, the GPL requires keeping a detailed ChangeLog, and if anyone's going to be a stickler about that, it's the FSF: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/patch.git/tree/ChangeLog-2...

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