Newbie Question

[Ben Ocean]

Hi;
New to both qmail and ldap <;-) Just took over a new box that had qmail 
installed (I installed ldap). The server farm sysop copied over the 
_source_tree from another box but presumably not to the original location 
(I don't know that it matters). I copied the patch to that directory and ran
patch -pl < the.patch.gz
while in the directory and got this error:
"patch: **** strip count l is not a number"
What does that mean and what do I do now?
TIA,
BenO