An error occurred (ValidationError) when calling the UpdateStack operation: No updates are to be performed

What is the correct command syntax for checking whether or not a specific call to aws cloudformation update-stack will result in any changes being made?

The problem we are having is that an automation program that runs an aws cloudformation update-stack --stack-name ourstackname --template-body file://c:\path\to\ourtemplate.json --parameters ParameterKey=someKey,ParameterValue=someValue ... command is failing with the following error:

An error occurred (ValidationError) when calling the UpdateStack operation: No updates are to be performed.

The result is a 254 http response code which we can tell from this documentation link means that a lot of possible problems could have occurred. So it would NOT help us to handle that 254 response code.

What aws cloudformation cli command syntax can we type instead to have the automation process receive a 0 response code in cases where no changes will be made? For example, a --flag added to the aws cloudformation update-stack ... command to return 0 when no changes are made.

Alternatively, if there were some preview command that returned 0 indicating that NO CHANGES WILL BE MADE, then our automation could simply refrain from calling aws cloudformation update-stack ... in that situation.

Terraform, for example defaults to simply succeeding while reporting that no changes have been made after a run when presented with this use case.