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

Question

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

Grim

Most likely PowerShell has corrupted the patch by turning it into UTF-16-LE. You can, however, get similar effects by forcing the git diff command to use color. This is why robust scripts avoid git diff and use instead the various plumbing commands. – Pernell

UTF-16 was my issue. From powershell you can fix it with Get-Content .\my.patch | Set-Content -Encoding utf8 .\myutf8.patch – Flexible

when i do this in bash, it takes my color codings that are applied to the normal diff, so the patch is corrupt, and dos2unix wont resolve it. e.g. i see a bunch of [1;33m at the line beginnings. Turns out it was my alias setup, which i used gd by muscle memory but git diff worked fine.. Thanks! – Octans

Answer 1

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

Matland

An alternative is to create the patch from Windows Command Prompt (cmd.exe). – Astir

This worked! Apologies for taking so long to accept it – Grim

As @Jordan suggested above another option is to use git bash, which wont be creating this problem. – Ida

Answer 2

Likely windows changed the line terminator to CRLF. Get it back to LF.

For anyone else struggling - I tried this, but I also had to re-save the patch file in UTF-8 format for git to recognise it.

Hesper

For me, CRLF was not an issue. But the format was and saving it in UTF-8 helped. – Backbend

Answer 3

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

Shook

Answer 4

Likely windows changed the line terminator to CRLF. Get it back to LF.

Greenwell

it would be nice if you had added how to actually do that... – Repetend

Answer 5

In my case the reason was the external diff helper set in git config, so specifying the --no-ext-diff flag helped

Floris

dude you just saved my day! I used difftastic and it was messing with git diff! – Armil

Answer 6

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

Puny