10.11.1 Controlling the Verbosity of patch

You can cause patch to produce more messages by using the ‘--verbose’ option. For example, when you give this option, the message ‘Hmm...’ indicates that patch is reading text in the patch file, attempting to determine whether there is a patch in that text, and if so, what kind of patch it is.

You can inhibit all terminal output from patch, unless an error occurs, by using the ‘-s’, ‘--quiet’, or ‘--silent’ option.