# Formatted patches

You can apply commits from another branch to the current branch with no problem.

* For a single commit, it's a cherry-pick
* For a sereis of commit, it's a rebase

However, this needs to be in the same repo. What if you want to apply a commit to a different repo?

### How to do it

Well, you can do that via formatted patches. The way it works is that you

1. save the commit as a formatted patch, a plain text file
2. send the file to someone
3. execute the formatted patch

### Command

To generate the formatted patch

```
git format-patch -l <commit> # Single commit
git format-patch <commit-1>...<commit-2> # A series of commits
```

### How it works

Each commit consists of a set of changes, and each change can be expressed as an instruction. A formatted patch is a text version of these instructions, which Git can understand and run.&#x20;

### What to look out for

To apply the formatted patch, the current file should be compatible. For example, if the change is to remove the line `import pandas as pd` in file `analyse.py`, it will fail if&#x20;

* you don't have a file named `analyse.py`, or
* the file doens't have this line