the package.json patch doesn't recover in the new package

[JeanZhao]

Thanks for your work.

Here I faced two problems.

1. npx patch-package --exclude '^$' doesn't work for me. Something I got was:

---

patch-package 6.2.2
• Creating temporary folder
• Installing [email protected] with npm
• Diffing your files with clean files
⁉️ Not creating patch file for package 'ts-loader'
⁉️ There don't appear to be any changes.

2. So I tried to exclude some non-existent file，e.g. npx patch-package --exclude 'a.txt'. It got worked(I can see the updated package.json in the patch file)
   Then, I tried to delete the old package, and do npm install, the package doesn't contain the patch file content.
   Btw, the script in my root project package.json, I added
   {"postinstall": "patch-package"}

Is there anything I missed? Please feel free to reproduce this issue with any npm package.

[karlhorky]

It seems to be working for me, this is what I'm doing:

yarn patch-package rehype-slug --exclude '^$'

Every time that I run yarn, it restores the patch, because of the postinstall script in my package.json:

  "scripts": {
    "postinstall": "patch-package"
  }

[umarluqman]

Thank you so much @karlhorky
By the way, what does the --exclude '^s' means?

[karlhorky]

@umarluqman careful, you have an s there, not a dollar sign :)

As far as I can tell, the --exclude '^$' is an option to exclude no files (the ^$ is an empty regular expression, matching no strings)

[FlorianWendelborn]

@umarluqman to elaborate on what @karlhorky said, here’s regexr’s explanation on what’s going on in that regular expression:

[umarluqman]

thank you @FlorianWendelborn and @karlhorky, that makes sense