When patching what’s the difference between arguments -p0 and -p1

The most common way to create a patch is to run the diff command or some version control's built-in diff-like command. Sometimes, you're just comparing two files, and you run diff like this:

diff -u version_by_alice.txt version_by_bob.txt >alice_to_bob.patch

Then you get a patch that contains changes for one file and doesn't contain a file name at all. When you apply that patch, you need to specify which file you want to apply it to:

patch <alice_to_bob.patch version2_by_alice.txt

Often, you're comparing two versions of a whole multi-file project contained in a directory. A typical invocation of diff looks like this:

diff -ru old_version new_version >some.patch

Then the patch contains file names, given in header lines like diff -ru old_version/dir/file new_version/dir/file. You need to tell patch to strip the prefix (old_version or new_version) from the file name. That's what -p1 means: strip one level of directory.

Sometimes, the header lines in the patch contain the file name directly with no lead-up. This is common with version control systems; for example cvs diff produces header lines that look like diff -r1.42 foo. Then there is no prefix to strip, so you must specify -p0.

In the special case when there are no subdirectories in the trees that you're comparing, no -p option is necessary: patch will discard all the directory part of the file names. But most of the time, you do need either -p0 or -p1, depending on how the patch was produced.