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

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

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.

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

Answer 4

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

Answer 5

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