patch

Webster's Dictionary (1913)

Origin: OE. pacche; of uncertain origin, perh. for placche; cf. Prov. E. platch patch, LG. plakk, plakke.

1. A piece of cloth, or other suitable material, sewed or otherwise fixed upon a garment to repair or strengthen it, esp. upon an old garment to cover a hole.

Patches set upon a little breach.— William Shakespeare

2. Hence: A small piece of anything used to repair a breach; as, a patch on a kettle, a roof, etc.

3. A small piece of black silk stuck on the face, or neck, to hide a defect, or to heighten beauty.

Your black patches you wear variously.— Francis, & Fletcher, John. Beaumont

4. Gunnery A piece of greased cloth or leather used as wrapping for a rifle ball, to make it fit the bore.

5. Fig.: Anything regarded as a patch; a small piece of ground; a tract; a plot; as, scattered patches of trees or growing corn.

Employed about this patch of ground.— John Bunyan

6. Military A block on the muzzle of a gun, to do away with the effect of dispart, in sighting.

7. A paltry fellow; a rogue; a ninny; a fool. obsolete or colloquial “Thou scurvy patch.” William Shakespeare

Patch ice, ice in overlapping pieces in the sea. — Soft patch, a patch for covering a crack in a metallic vessel, as a steam boiler, consisting of soft material, as putty, covered and held in place by a plate bolted or riveted fast.

1. To mend by sewing on a piece or pieces of cloth, leather, or the like; as, to patch a coat.

2. To mend with pieces; to repair with pieces festened on; to repair clumsily; as, to patch the roof of a house.

3. To adorn, as the face, with a patch or patches.

Ladies who patched both sides of their faces.— The Spectator

4. To make of pieces or patches; to repair as with patches; to arrange in a hasty or clumsy manner; — generally with up; as, to patch up a truce. “If you'll patch a quarrel.” William Shakespeare

Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913), from GCIDE 0.54

Free On-line Dictionary of Computing

<software> 1. A temporary addition to a piece of code, usually as a quick-and-dirty remedy to an existing bug or misfeature. A patch may or may not work, and may or may not eventually be incorporated permanently into the program. Distinguished from a diff or mod by the fact that a patch is generated by more primitive means than the rest of the program; the classical examples are instructions modified by using the front panel switches, and changes made directly to the binary executable of a program originally written in an HLL. Compare one-line fix.

2.To insert a patch into a piece of code.

3.[in the Unix world] A diff.

4.A set of modifications to binaries to be applied by a patching program. IBM systems often receive updates to the operating system in the form of absolute hexadecimal patches. If you have modified your OS, you have to disassemble these back to the source code. The patches might later be corrected by other patches on top of them (patches were said to "grow scar tissue"). The result was often a convoluted patch space and headaches galore.

There is a classic story of a tiger team penetrating a secure military computer that illustrates the danger inherent in binary patches (or, indeed, any patches that you can't - or don't - inspect and examine before installing). They couldn't find any trap doors or any way to penetrate security of IBM's OS, so they made a site visit to an IBM office (remember, these were official military types who were purportedly on official business), swiped some IBM stationery, and created a fake patch. The patch was actually the trapdoor they needed. The patch was distributed at about the right time for an IBM patch, had official stationery and all accompanying documentation, and was dutifully installed. The installation manager very shortly thereafter learned something about proper procedures.

5.Larry Wall's "patch" utility program, which automatically applies a patch to a set of source code or other text files. Patch accepts input in any of the four forms output by the Unix diff utility. When the files being patched are not identical to those on which the diffs were based, patch uses heuristics to determine how to proceed.

Diff and patch are the standard way of producing and applying updates under Unix. Both have been ported to other operating systems.

Patch Home (http://gnu.org/software/patch/patch.html). [Jargon File]

(2005-05-16)

The Jargon File

1.n. A temporary addition to a piece of code, usually as a quick-and-dirty remedy to an existing bug or misfeature. A patch may or may not work, and may or may not eventually be incorporated permanently into the program. Distinguished from a diff or mod by the fact that a patch is generated by more primitive means than the rest of the program; the classical examples are instructions modified by using the front panel switches, and changes made directly to the binary executable of a program originally written in an HLL. Compare one-line fix.

2.vt. To insert a patch into a piece of code.

3.[in the Unix world] n. A diff (sense 2).

4.A set of modifications to binaries to be applied by a patching program. IBM operating systems often receive updates to the operating system in the form of absolute hexadecimal patches. If you have modified your OS, you have to disassemble these back to the source. The patches might later be corrected by other patches on top of them (patches were said to “grow scar tissue”). The result was often a convoluted patch space and headaches galore.

5.[Unix] the patch(1) program, written by Larry Wall, which automatically applies a patch (sense 3) to a set of source code.

There is a classic story of a tiger team penetrating a secure military computer that illustrates the danger inherent in binary patches (or, indeed, any patches that you can't — or don't — inspect and examine before installing). They couldn't find any trap doors or any way to penetrate security of IBM's OS, so they made a site visit to an IBM office (remember, these were official military types who were purportedly on official business), swiped some IBM stationery, and created a fake patch. The patch was actually the trapdoor they needed. The patch was distributed at about the right time for an IBM patch, had official stationery and all accompanying documentation, and was dutifully installed. The installation manager very shortly thereafter learned something about proper procedures.