Installing Clamav antivirus is very simple:

Debian and Ubuntu:

sudo apt install clamav clamav-daemon  

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After installation, you need to set up automatic antivirus database updates and regular disk system scans
In order to update the anti-virus database you should first stop the automatic database update service:

sudo systemctl stop clamav-freshclam  

Then enter the following command in the terminal:

sudo freshclam  

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Next, run the automatic update command again:

sudo systemctl start clamav-freshclam  

You can also update the virus databases manually. To do this, download the files main.cvd, daily.cvd and bytecode.cvd from official site.

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Then put them in the /var/lib/clamav/ folder:

cp ~/ Downloads/*.cvd /var/lib/clamav/  

And make them the owner of the clamav user:

chown clamav:clamav /var/lib/clamav/*.cvd  

chmod 644 /var/lib/clamav/*.cvd  

To re-read the databases, you need to restart the antivirus service:

sudo systemctl restart clamav  

To check the version of your antivirus, you can do the following:

clamd --version  
root@dsde949-22869:~# clamd --version  
ClamAV 0.103.5  

If you like working in a graphical interface, you can install the ClamTK utility for antivirus management. This tool is also available from the official repositories:

sudo apt install clamtk  

Then you can run the utility from the main menu:

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All that remains is to add the script to run automatically on a schedule (daily, for example)
To do this, edit cron:

# crontab -e

And add to it the line

39 3 1-5 * * /root/clamav.sh  

Uninstalling CLAMAV antivirus

If you want to remove ClamAV from Ubuntu, use this command:

sudo apt remove clamav clamav-daemon  

And if you installed the database files separately, you should remove them too:

sudo rm -Rf /var/lib/clamav  

If you have any configuration difficulties or have further questions, you can always contact our support team via ticket system.

Updated July 18, 2022