: Have you tried downward patches? There's a bug in the most recent patch
: (still 2.1 after many years, AFAIK)
By some coincidence, I made patch 2.1a yesterday -
see ftp.win.tue.nl:/pub/linux/gnu-fixed/patch-2.1a.tar.gz .
The bug I fixed was about creating new files:
If in a "diff path1/foo.c path2/foo.c" only one of the two
files exists, then that is the file patch will patch.
But if foo.c is a new file, patch chooses essentially at random
which of the two to create (namely, it chooses the shortest name).
I fixed patch to look at the directories path1 and path2,
and if only one of these exist, the new file foo.c will be
created there.
[This came up because patch failed on the axp-*-diff for the alpha.]
Your problem is about deleting old files.
I am not sure I understand your demo script - it is a bit
confusing to use foo and foo~ as files, when also patch
may be creating foo~, and there are other problems with
the script. If you have a short demo showing that something
is wrong with reverse patches I'll probably fix it and
produce patch-2.1b.
Andries