Upgraded to WordPress 1.5.2, patches [re-]applied

I finally got around to upgrading my WordPress blog software to version 1.5.2 today. I also took this opportunity to apply Kimmo’s entity patch, which takes care of HTML entities ½ and ¾, and probably some others as well. At least I remembered to reapply the tags patch this time!

Applying these patches got me thinking about folks that aren’t “patch-aware”, i.e. don’t know how to apply patches. It’s almost trivially simple. On a Unix (or Unix-like) system, the command is:
patch original-file patch-file
where patch-file is the name of the file containing the patch(es), while original-file is the file that you are going to fix. This works fine as long as only one file is affected, as is the case with Kimmo’s patch. You can tell this by reading the patch file and looking for long lines of punctuation such as
***************
or
===================================================================
If you see more than one of these lines, there are multiple files affected. Such is the case with Felix Wong’s tags patch. For this one, the command is:
patch -p1 <patch-file
which should be executed from your wordpress directory. Explaining this command requires knowledge of directories/file structures, which I don’t want to cover right now.