git: programmatically know by how much the branch is ahead/behind a remote branch

Question

I would like to extract the information that is printed after a git status, which looks like:

# On branch master
# Your branch is ahead of \'origin/         


        

Answer 1

git status has a --porcelain option that is intended for parsing by scripts. It is based on the --short output - they are almost identical at the time of writing (see the "Porcelain Format" section of the git status man page for details). The main difference is that --short has colour output.

By default no branch information is shown, but if you add the --branch option you will get output like:

git status --short --branch
## master...origin/master [ahead 1]
?? untrackedfile.txt
...

If you are up to date (after a fetch), the branch line will just be:

## master

If you are ahead:

## master...origin/master [ahead 1]

If you are behind:

## master...origin/master [behind 58]

And for both:

## master...origin/master [ahead 1, behind 58]

Note that git status --porcelain --branch is only available in 1.7.10.3 or later (though git status --short --branch has been available since 1.7.2 ).