Sometimes mailers, editors, or other programs change spaces into tabs, or vice
versa. If this happens to a patch file or an input file, the files might look
the same, but patch will not be able to match them properly. If this problem
occurs, use the '-l' or'--ignore-white-space' option, which makes patch compare white space loosely so that any sequence
of white space in the patch file matches any sequence of whitespace in the input
files. Non-whitespace characters must still match exactly. Each line of the
context must still match a line in the input file. See also Applying Reversed Patches and Helping patch Find Inexact Matches for more details.
