Updating and using clamav in linux

Clamav is an antivirus tool used in many different operating system distributions. It can be installed via yum

yum install clam*

This will install all the relevant packages including any recent definitions. However, if you need to update clamav manually you can use the command

freschclam

This will update your virus definitions. After your definitions are updated you will need to perform a scan on your system. You can perform the scan as follows

clamscan --recursive --log=/root/clamscan.log / --exclude-dir=/somedir

It will do a recursive scan of the operating system root “/” and exclude any directories that you specify. The virus log output will be deposited in the logfile that you specify.