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

i'd do a test on this:

git diff --quiet --cached

or this to be explicit:

git diff --quiet --exit-code --cached

where:

--exit-code

Make the program exit with codes similar to diff(1). That is, it exits with 1 if there were differences and 0 means no differences.

--quiet

Disable all output of the program. Implies --exit-code