Will said:

My questions for y'all are how would you go about doing this? Use vi to delete everything through the ==== cut here line? Use some combination of standard unix tools to chop it up? What was your workflow for patching up the system using these files?

sed -e '1,/---cut here---/d' < $patch | sh -x

is what I use, but there's a wide variety of 'cut here' lines in the 2.11BSD patches, so I have had to taylor to each patch.