How to check if there's nothing to be committed in the current branch?
Solution 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 '/$'
The -v
to egrep
means to only output lines that don't match the pattern, and the pattern matches any line that ends with a /
.
Solution 2:
The return value of git status
just tells you the exit code of git status
, not if there are any modifications to be committed.
If you want a more computer-readable version of the git status
output, try
git status --porcelain
See the description of git status
for more information about that.
Sample use (script simply tests if git status --porcelain
gives any output, no parsing needed):
if [ -n "$(git status --porcelain)" ]; then
echo "there are changes";
else
echo "no changes";
fi
Please note that you have to quote the string to test, i.e. the output of git status --porcelain
. For more hints about test constructs, refer to the Advanced Bash Scripting Guide (Section string comparison).
Solution 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 $$;
Solution 4:
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.