In “Check if Git working tree is dirty”, git diff and git status were used to check if a working directory is dirty.

To get the exit status code, you can extract the value from the shell variable $?:

git diff --quiet; echo $?

Exit code of 0 means the working directory is clean. Exit code of 1 means the working directory is dirty.

Code	Type
0	Clean
1	Dirty

For faster performance, you can use git diff-index since it’s a lower level operation:

git diff-index --quiet HEAD; echo $?