Wanted: A script that upon entering a directory asynchronously checks the git remotes for updates and reports if there is something to pull.

— Pascal Hartig (@passy) May 1, 2013

So, here the code I came up with [First cut] :

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function cd() {
  async() {
    {
      $2 $($1)
    }&
  }

  notify_callback() {
    [[ $1 > 0 ]] && echo "You have new stuff to pull!"
  }

  # If it's a git repo, check if we need to pull.
  if git rev-parse --is-inside-work-tree &>/dev/null; then
    async "git rev-list HEAD...origin/master --count" notify_callback
  fi
 
  builtin cd "$@"
}

Place this in your .bashrc to override the cd command, to check if you cd to a git repo and then check and notify you if you need to pull stuff.

Happy Hacking! :-)

Update 0:

Better approach would be to use (( $(git rev-list HEAD..@{u} --count) > 0 )) && echo "There are new things to merge"