Existence or Version Checks

In some instances you will want to make sure a certain file exist in a given version and deny applying the patch file when it is not present even though the file itself has not changed at all.

This can be accomplished by forcing a patch of this file where it is normally not necessary. GenPatch will skip files while in processed the end state when this file is identical in all start states. It would be useless to include information about them, unless you want to force an version check of these files.

But you can force adding a real small patch information to the patch file with the GenPatch option "-force=pattern" that makes the GenPatch try to "update" this file anyway. Make sure you do not mark the file as unimportant as otherwise you no longer require the file to be present, but would tolerate failure of your existence check which is not what you want.