Discontinuing a long running script

Looking at a bash script I wrote yesterday I see that I did not give the user a way of discontinuing the processing's long run. The user's only resort was to kill the process. Killing a long-running script is never good action. Where was the script in it's process coordination? Is clean-up needed? If so, from where and how? It would be better to let the script exit at a good discontinuation point.

To this end, I would like to write the script

. Logger.sh
. Continuance.sh

CONTINUANCE=$(continuance $(basename $0))

for f in ...
do
   if [ -e $CONTINUANCE ]
   then
       info Processing $f
       ...
   else
       warn Process discontinued before completion
       exit 1
   fi
done

or

. Logger.sh
. Continuance.sh

C=$(continuance $(basename $0))

while [ -e $CONTINUANCE  ]
do
   ...   
done

if [ ! -e $CONTINUANCE  ]
then
    warn Process discontinued before completion
fi

Where the call to "continuance" creates a temporary file, sets up a HUP trap to delete the file, and prints the instructions

2008-08-11 13:58:26 INFO To discontinue processing 
send "kill -HUP 31788" or remove the file 
/tmp/u-continuance-ITexo31793

The function is very simple

function continuance {
    f=$(mktemp -p /tmp $1-continuance-XXXXXXXXXX)
    trap "rm -f $f" HUP
    info To discontinue processing send \"kill -HUP $$\" or remove the file $f
    echo $f
}