tar-1.21 patches in Version SVN-200902017
 

Some of the patches I have used in LFS give me an output of : patch: **** Only garbage was found in the patch input. the one I am at now is the ones for tar-1.121. The book gives the following commands:
patch -Np1 -i ../tar-1.21-testsuite_fix-1.patch
patch -Np1 -i ../tar-1.21-remove_warning-1.patch
so I am not deviating from the commands. Here are my command with the error messages:

/mnt/lfs/sources/tar-1.21$ patch -Np1 -i tar-1.21-testsuite_fix-1.patch
patch: **** Only garbage was found in the patch input.

/mnt/lfs/sources/tar-1.21$ patch -Np1 -i tar-1.21-remove_warning-1.patch
patch: **** Only garbage was found in the patch input.

I guess my question is is this patch no longer need it or do I need to manipulate the patches? I am clueless on how to manipulate the patches.

First, your actual commands are not the same as the commands in the book. Second, what to the patch files look like if you open them in your favorite text editor. That error generally means the patch file is not properly formatted as a patch. Maybe they got corrupted when you downloaded them or they were corrupted from the mirror you used.

I took your advise and redownloaded them from another source other than the book since I already tried downloading them again from the book source. I open both sources patches and compared the two and they were different.I used the new source patches and the patches went well.