It took me a moment to figure out why this script didn't work on my Debian system. Evidently, it assumes pwd is in /usr/bin/ though this is not always the case. I would recommend making a local variable (e.g. PWD=$(pwd)) at the beginning of the script and have it attempt to whatever pwd is found in the path by default.

patchfile=$(/usr/bin/pwd)/vmware.patch

P.S. Thanks for publishing your work regarding this! I had run into this once before and used an article on the VMware community forums, but now that I am facing it again after system upgrade it's just my luck that that community site is down for maintenance. You saved my day :)