How to check if there's nothing to be committed in the current branch?

Question

The goal is to get an unambiguous status that can be evaluated in a shell command.

I tried git status but it always returns 0, even if there are items

Answer 1

It's possible to combine git status --porcelain with a simple grep to perform the test.

if git status --porcelain | grep .; then
    echo Repo is dirty
else
    echo Repo is clean
fi

I use this as a simple one-liner sometimes:

# pull from origin if our repo is clean
git status --porcelain | grep . || git pull origin master

Add -qs to your grep command to make it silent.