I will write here every single one of those amazing dudes and gals that have contributed to my growth as a developer, I'm speechless.

• 504830046465163265 ./1.sh the inner elif and else that you indented are part of the same if block and there can't be more than one else in an if also exit inside a function will exit the script so echo "Loading.." wont run and -eq only compares numbers, not strings

• sshaw_ https://www.shellcheck.net/

• ladrm What you are doing wrong is craving human attention every time the script is run. Ideally scripts are non-interactive and should not require any interaction in form of "Do you want abc (y/n/maybe)". Especially on stdin - it should be used for data input, command line arguments are used to modify behavior of the scritpt. Also questions of "do you really wanna do this" are sort of useless, since operator is saying to you that he wants to perform the action at the time the script is started, or we use something like -f/--force (or -n/--dry-run) arguments where it makes sense. Also in "content failed to start" you probably want to have some form of error raised (return 1/exit 1). And error/warning messages should go to stderr.

• dctec I always use double brackets. https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/031 Use == for comparing strings. '-eq' is for comparing numbers ( $ help test ) .. your file_count function is not really counting, I'm guessing you are just using this as example. Anyway, here's a shorter version to accomplish a count after a prompt:

  #!/bin/bash
  read -p "Do you wish to count all files? [y/n]?" myvar
  [[ $myvar == "y" ]] && find ./ -type f -maxdepth 1 |wc -l || echo "content failed to start\!"

• MaxxFlowDE To check $input, you could use "case" to make it more solid and intuitive

case ${input,,} in
  y|j|yes|ja) 
     echo "yes, let's do it..."
     ...your code... 
     ;;
  *) 
     echo not matched and maybe exit script or return function or whatever 
      return 1
     ;;
esac

,, outputs the $input variable content lower case, so you only have to enter your matching cases in lower case.

When using if and == and variable could be empty, prepend with something like "x".

if [ "x$input" == "xy" ] ; then

This may protect you from strange behavior when variable is empty.

When using if with -eq , surround the variables with quotation marks to prevent bash syntax errors. (missing argument)

if [ "$number" -eq 0 ] ; then

Last tip: do not use ls. Use find instead, where possible.