I'd still need to find a way to massage the data into the mbox format because that is the ancient format that git understands.

I'm not saying that there isn't a way to do that. Only that it can only be done poorly with a big ugly (and probably buggy) spaghetti script that looks nothing like what the expressive demo suggests it should look like.

If you're getting a bunch of stuff with curl from GitHub can't you just use curl to get the patches directly from github?

Append .patch to the end of a pr or commit and it spits out the mbox formatted patch.

https://github.com/jiphex/mbox/commit/f139c575e306a1691a31d8...

If you do that with curl it will redirect to the login page. Github obviously wants me to use their API.

I assume this wasn't always the case as the use case I'm referencing is a build script I'm debugging.

I just tried running curl on it now and it came back fine without redirecting me.

For a private repo you just need to set the correct options to curl.

curl -Lk --cookie "user_session=your_session_cookie_here" https://github.com/your_org/your_project/pull/123.patch

And what is the unix tool I use to automatically retrieve the session cookie and paste it there?

Naturally, you use curl. You just instruct curl to save the cookies that the login process sends back to you. Then you reuse those cookies on the subsequent request.

Found an example here.

https://gist.github.com/d48/3501047

The example link above works for me, interestingly enough.