Patch command help

Hello All,

I have a patch file which contains following types of lines -

@@ -617,14 +617,8 @@

What does they signify ?

It (probably) means that you've got an unified diff, most probably made by GNU diff, where the following text shows the difference between 14 lines of the original file, starting at line 617, versus 8 total lines of the new file, also starting at line 617. So in total, at least 6 lines were deleted, and the others might also have been changed.