How can I make a shell script indicate that it was successful? - sh

Question

If I have a basic .sh file containing the following script code:
#!/bin/sh
rm -rf "MyFolder"
How do I make this running script file display results to the terminal that will indicate if the directory removal was successful?

Answer 1

You don't really need to make it say it was successful. You could have it say something only on error ✖, and then silence means success ✔.
That's how the Unix philosophy works:
The rule of silence, also referred to as the silence is golden rule, is an important part of the Unix philosophy that states that when a program has nothing surprising, interesting or useful to say, it should say nothing. It means that well-behaved programs should treat their users' attention and concentration as being valuable and thus perform their tasks as unobtrusively as possible. That is, silence in itself is a virtue. http://www.linfo.org/rule_of_silence.html
That's the way rm itself behaves.

Answer 2

If you are asking about the general case, as suggested by your question's title, you can run your script with sh -x scriptname to see what it's doing. It's also quite common to write diagnostic output into the script itself, and control it with an option.
#!/bin/sh
verbose=false
case $1 in -v | --verbose )
verbose=true
shift ;;
esac
say () {
$verbose || return
echo "$0: $#" >&2
}
say "Removing $dir ..."
rm -rf "$dir" || say "Failed."
If you run this script without any options, it will run silently, like a well-behaved Unix utility should. If you run it with the -v option, it will print some diagnostics to standard error.

Answer 3

rm -rf "My Folder" && echo "Done" || echo "Error!"
You can read more on creating a sequence of pipelines in bash manual

Answer 4

In the bash (and other similar shells) the ? environment variable gives you the exit code of the last executed command. So you can do:
#!/bin/sh
rm -rf "My Folder"
echo $?
UPDATE
If once the rm command has been executed the directory doesn't exist (because it has been successfully removed or because it didn't exist when the command was executed) the script will print 0. If the directory exists (which will mean that the command has been unable to remove it) then the script will print an exit code other than 0. If I understand properly the question this is exactly the requested behavior. If it is not, please correct me.

Answer 5

The previous answers was wrong : rm don't exit with error code > 0 when the dir isn't present.
Instead, I recommend to use :
dir='/path/to/dir'
if [[ -d $dir ]]; then
rm -rf "$dir"
fi
If you want rm to return a status, remove -f flag.
Example on Linux Mint (the dir doesn't exists):
$ rm -rf /tmp/sdfghjklm
$ echo $?
0
$ rm -r /tmp/sdfghjklm
$ echo $?
1