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

An alternative to testing whether the output of git status --porcelain is empty is to test each condition you care about separately. One might not always care, for example, if there are untracked files in the output of git status.

For example, to see if there are any local unstaged changes, you can look at the return code of:

git diff --exit-code

To check if there are any changes that are staged but not committed, you can use the return code of:

git diff --cached --exit-code

Finally, if you want to know about whether there are any untracked files in your working tree that aren't ignored, you can test whether the output of the following command is empty:

git ls-files --other --exclude-standard --directory

Update: You ask below whether you can change that command to exclude the directories in the output. You can exclude empty directories by adding --no-empty-directory, but to exclude all directories in that output I think you'll have to filter the output, such as with:

git ls-files --other --exclude-standard --directory | egrep -v '/$'

The -v to egrep means to only output lines that don't match the pattern, and the pattern matches any line that ends with a /.

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

If you are like me, you want to know if there are:

1) changes to existing files 2) newly added files 3) deleted files

and specifically do not want to know about 4) untracked files.

This should do it:

git status --untracked-files=no --porcelain

Here's my bash code to exit the script if the repo is clean. It uses the short version of the untracked files option:

[[ -z $(git status -uno --porcelain) ]] && echo "this branch is clean, no need to push..." && kill -SIGINT $$;

Answer 4

I'm using this in a script to have:

• 0 when everything is clean

• 1 when there is a diff or untracked files

  [ -z "$(git status --porcelain)" ]

Answer 5

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

Answer 6

I'm a bit late in the discussion, but if it's only that you need to have an exit code of 0 if git status --porcelain returns nothing and != 0 else, try this:

exit $( git status --porcelain | wc -l )

This will make the number of lines be the exit code, at the risk of getting issues when there's more than 255 lines. So

exit $( git status --porcelain | head -255 | wc -l )

will account for that ;)