The "cvs status" command is practically useless, given the amount of stuff it spews out. So I do the following to find out the status of my local working copy. This shows all updated, added, or deleted files, as well as those CVS know nothing about (and which perhaps should be added):
1 cvs status 2>&1 | egrep "(^\? |Status: )" | grep -v Up-to-date
