You can ask the diff machinery to let the exit code indicate whether there are changes, e.g. with --quiet. It as two ways to calculate that bit: The quick one assumes blobs with different hashes have different content, and the more elaborate way actually compares the contents, possibly applying transformations like ignoring whitespace. The quick way considers an unmerged file to be a change and reports exit code 1, which makes sense. The slower path uses the struct diff_options member found_changes to indicate whether the blobs differ even with the transformations applied. It's not set for unmerged files, though, resulting in exit code 0. Set found_changes in run_diff_cmd() for unmerged files, for a consistent exit code of 1 if there's an unmerged file, regardless of whether whitespace is ignored. Signed-off-by: René Scharfe <l.s.r@xxxxxx> --- diff.c | 1 + t/t4046-diff-unmerged.sh | 8 ++++++++ 2 files changed, 9 insertions(+) diff --git a/diff.c b/diff.c index 108c187577..ded9ac70df 100644 --- a/diff.c +++ b/diff.c @@ -4555,6 +4555,7 @@ static void run_diff_cmd(const char *pgm, o, complete_rewrite); } else { fprintf(o->file, "* Unmerged path %s\n", name); + o->found_changes = 1; } } diff --git a/t/t4046-diff-unmerged.sh b/t/t4046-diff-unmerged.sh index ffaf69335f..c606ee4c40 100755 --- a/t/t4046-diff-unmerged.sh +++ b/t/t4046-diff-unmerged.sh @@ -96,4 +96,12 @@ test_expect_success 'diff --stat' ' test_cmp diff-stat.expect diff-stat.actual ' +test_expect_success 'diff --quiet' ' + test_expect_code 1 git diff --cached --quiet +' + +test_expect_success 'diff --quiet --ignore-all-space' ' + test_expect_code 1 git diff --cached --quiet --ignore-all-space +' + test_done -- 2.45.0