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

Not pretty, but works:

git status | grep -qF 'working directory clean' || echo "DIRTY"

Not sure whether the message is locale dependent, so maybe put a LANG=C in front.