Upgrade Drupal a version with an automatic patch

http://2bits.com/articles/upgrading-drupal-5-2-installations-to-5-3-security-releases-using-a-single-patch.html

Agaric has modified version the shell command version (listed by Khalid right above the comments) to be a script that can patch Drupal regardless of the name of its current directory..

Agaric's version is attached.

Put it in a directory such as /usr/sbin and make sure to chmod it to executable (chmod a+x version-upgrade-diff). Oh, and Drupal's file uploader added a period which you will probably want to remove.

The script expects to be called from within the root directory of the drupal installation you are updating (for instance /var/www/mydrupalinstall) or, optionally, call the script from anywhere but include a full path like the above after the two required arguments, which are current version number and new version number to upgrade to, in the format 5.5 5.6 (or 5.1 5.6 if you missed a couple). For instance:

cd /var/www/d5
/usr/sbin/version-upgrade-diff 5.3 5.6

Resolution