Shell / Perl script to constantly comb a folder for new files & make copies of the new files

The encryption software is from an AV product called qdecrypt which
encrypts infected files to make them harmless.

Yes, I'm looking at Qlemo scripts but just posted an update: if only
Qlemo's script track for the last date/time the script last stop/went
down, that will be perfect

You could add logging events that would write out to a file or a DB that the script ran, and finished......

In the above script echo $(date "%b-%d-%Y %H:%M:%s") started/stopped >> record_file

.....

Or is there something you could add to the script that
will detect an "exit" or the script being killed like
(in the days I was doing VMS DCL scripting):

on error perform ...
on fatal_error perform ...