The advantage of this method is you will keep modifications you have made in the code of that vendor.
In my description I use FreeBSD and Mac OS X so you might need to adjust the commands for a different Operating System.

Create the patch file

First download the old and the new version code from your vendor site. In this example this is the website of CakePHP.
You need this that you can match the old version to the new version you want to upgrade to.

Create a temp directory to work in.

mkdir myUpgrade
cd myUpgrade

Download the two versions of CakePHP, your current and the version you desire to upgrade to

• http://github.com/cakephp/cakephp1x/tarball/1.3.0-RC3
• http://github.com/cakephp/cakephp1x/tarball/1.3.0-RC4

Unpack tarballs:

tar -xzvf cakephp-cakephp1x-348e5f0.tar.gz
tar -xzvf cakephp-cakephp1x-f63ab48.tar.gz

Now create the aptch width using the diff utility:

diff -Naur -x '.svn' -x '._*' cakephp-cakephp1x-348e5f0 cakephp-cakephp1x-f63ab48 > cakephp.diff

Applying the patch

To apply the patch file you created in the previous step, change into your real vendor directory and run the patch tool.
You may first want to do a test run to see if any conflicts may happen and what files are affected:

cd myUpgrade
patch -E -p1 < ../cakephp.diff --dry-run

The output should be something like this:

patching file cake/VERSION.txt
patching file cake/basics.php
patching file cake/config/config.php
*etc*

When you're happy, apply the patch:

patch -E -p1 < ../cakephp.diff

Once patch is applied you're done

A flowchart of how this goes:

For more info see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test-driven_development

This script runs it in the background and you could make your commands send their output to a log file and still having full control.

Read the code below how to use it.

You can compile it by placing the code into shellproxy.c and then compile it with the following command:

gcc -o shellproxy shellproxy.c

I hope this is something useful for you as it was for me.

#include <stdio .h>
#include <stdlib .h>
#include <string .h>
 
int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
    char command[1024];
    int t;
 
    if (argc == 1) {
        printf("nShell Proxyn");
        printf("By Marius van Witzenburg <http ://kitara.nl>nn");
        printf("You will mostly use this program from PHP or any othern");
        printf("webscripting language to background run programsnn");
        printf("Usage:n");
        printf("- CLI:n");
        printf("shellproxy "<cmd> <arg>"n");
        printf("shellproxy "<cmd> <arg> > redirect.txt"n");
        printf("- PHP:n");
        printf("system('shellproxy "<cmd> <arg> &"');n");
        printf("system('shellproxy "<cmd> <arg> > redirect.txt"');nn");
    }
 
    command[0] = 0;
 
    for (t = 1; t < argc; t++) {
        strcat(command, argv[t]);
        strcat(command, " ");
    }
 
    fclose(stdin);
    fclose(stdout);
    fclose(stderr);
 
    system(command);
}

It would be nice if you keep my name mentioned into this code if you use it.

Ps. Donations are welcome...