Re: How to check repository/working tree status from a script

> On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 09:18:12AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>> On Tue, 19 May 2009, Marc Haber wrote:
>> > On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 04:34:47PM +0100, Tony Finch wrote:
>> > > On Tue, 19 May 2009, Marc Haber wrote:
>> > > > I would like to check in a script whether there (a) are uncommitted
>> > > > changes (as in "working tree differs from local repository")
>> > >
>> > > # check working tree is not different from the index
>> > > git diff --quiet
>> > > # check that the index is not different from the head
>> > > git diff --quiet --cached
>> >
>> > $ git diff --quiet; echo $?
>> > 0
>> > $ git diff --quiet --cached; echo $?
>> > 0
>> > $ touch keks
>> > $ git diff --quiet; echo $?
>> > 0
>> > $ git diff --quiet --cached; echo $?
>> > 0
>> > $
>> >
>> > Am I missing something?
>>
>> If "keks" is already something you know about, then 'touch' wouldn't have
>> changed it, so diff won't show it.
>
> keks didn't exist previously, so the touch generated a new empty 0 byte
> file.

>
>> And if what you want to know about is whether there are _new_ files you
>> might want to check, then you need a third check: 'git ls-files'. You
>> won't see it in the error code, but you can do
>>
>>       others=$(git ls-files -o --exclude-standard)
>>
>> and then check it 'others' is empty or not.
>
> So parsing the output is both the canonical and only way to do so
> since there is no meaningful exit code? Can I assume that the
> formatting of git output is not subject to change?