This is Debian's prepackaged version of patch, Larry Wall's program that allows you to apply diffs to a file automagically. The current maintainer for this package is Christoph Berg . Previous maintainers were Bill Mitchell , Darren Stalder , Adrian Bunk , and Michael Fedrowitz . The upstream source is available at 'ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/patch/', resp. 'ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/diffutils/'. Upstream Maintainer: Paul Eggert Copyright: Copyright (C) 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988 Larry Wall Copyright (C) 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2002, 2003 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; see the file COPYING. If not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA On Debian systems the complete text of the GNU General Public License can be found in '/usr/share/common-licenses/GPL'.