You didn't answer whether or not entries in deletefile.txt are supposed to be individual files or could be directories. I will assume that they can be either since you specified rm -rf.

You echo'ed Files Deleted, but using rm -f you have no idea whether or not the individual file or the directory and all of the files under it was removed. I removed the -f and captured diagnostics for files that couldn't be removed in your log file and added Files Deleted to the log file only if all of the files for that invocation of rm succeeded.

You did not have a loop around the evaluation of your response to the prompt asking if the user really wants to delete files. So, Invalid choice, choose again didn't make any sense to me. Therefore, I combined the no and unrecognized responses to just log the time when the script was called and note that the request was cancelled.

You use $LOGFILE, but never set it in your script. I set it to the base name of your script with .log appended.

You have a log file, but you didn't capture any indication that the requested actions completed successfully or failed. The log file now captures the argument given to rm, any diagnostics produced by rm, and a success indication if rm completed successfully for each invocation of rm.

If the user replies no (or any other answer that is not yes), you will only get that message in the log file once; not once per line in deletefiles.txt.

You also didn't say what OS or shell you're using. The following script was written and tested using the Korn shell, but will work with any shell that supports the basic syntax specified by the POSIX Standards:

Code:

#!/bin/ksh
IAm=${0##*/}
LOGFILE="$IAm.log"
echo "CAUTION : Files once deleted cannot be restored"
printf 'Would you like to continue? ("yes" or "no"): '
read INPUT
case "$INPUT" in
(yes)	while read -r i
	do	date -u "+ %Y%m%d %H:%M  GMT -[*] - Deleting files $i" >> \
			$LOGFILE
		rm -r "$i" 2>> $LOGFILE && echo "Files Deleted" >> $LOGFILE
	done < deletefiles.txt;;
(*)	date -u '+ %Y%m%d %H:%M GMT - [!] - Deleting files cancelled' >> \
		$LOGFILE;;
esac

If you run this in a directory where deletefiles.txt contains:

Code:

file1
non-existent_file2
file3

and the files file1 and file3 are existing regular files, but non-existent_file2 does not exist, then running this script produces a log file containing:

Code:

 20140728 09:03  GMT -[*] - Deleting files file1
Files Deleted
 20140728 09:03  GMT -[*] - Deleting files non-existent_file2
rm: non-existent_file2: No such file or directory
 20140728 09:03  GMT -[*] - Deleting files file3
Files Deleted

if you respond yes to the initial prompt.