pine patch installation

I am trying to install a patch that allows pine to read Maildir format. I'm running pine4.58 and the script is called pine-4.58-maildir.patch. I followed the instructions to install it.

pine and pine-4.58-maildir.patch are in /usr

$ cd /usr
$ patch -p1 < pine-4.58-maildir.patch

--- the prompt I get is

Looks like a context diff to me...
File to patch:

-- I tried other p values, and even c. The first 2 lines in the file are as follows, and all other diffs are the same. I'm using gnu diff.

diff -Nur pine4.58/README.maildir pine4.58-maildir/README.maildir
--- pine4.58/README.maildir Thu Jan 1 01:00:00 1970

Any help would be appreciated

Sounds like you are trying to patch a program that's already compiled and installed ... "pine" may reside in /usr/bin/pine, but you cannot patch a binary... you must recompile.

Download Pine 4.58 from UW's website, untar it to a home dir, such as /home/user/pine-4.58, copy the patch to the home dir and then run the patch from the compile directory:

$ patch -p1 < /home/user/pine-4.58-maildir.patch

Then compile according to the Instructions and install the binaries to their proper locations.