From: Maarten Billemont Date: Mon, 28 Mar 2011 07:44:34 GMT Subject: git-am cannot apply git format-patch -M Message-ID: <09D72CB4-1B48-4799-B0D5-DB54942D840F@gmail.com> I've created a series of patches for my local commits using: git format-patch -M -C ... The resulting patch files contain hunks like: diff --git a/file1 b/file2 similarity index 93% rename from file1 rename to file2 index 7cf3a09..88c9c13 100644 --- a/file1 +++ b/file2 [...] git-am fails at applying these hunks, failing with: Applying: [commit description] fatal: git apply: bad git-diff - inconsistent old filename on line 109 Patch failed at [HEAD commit] When you have resolved this problem run "git am --resolved". If you would prefer to skip this patch, instead run "git am --skip". To restore the original branch and stop patching run "git am --abort". Additionally, I'd like to report that the line number reported by git-am in this error message does not reflect the actual line number of the problem in the patch file. The reported line number is offset by -[amount of lines before the [---] line in the patch file], which makes understanding the error message hard, confusing and potentially misleading.