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Archives and compressed files

Clam Antivirus supports many popular compressors. It uses external programs for each format. It doesn't have built-in code due to licences and the number of formats. If the scanner runs with superuser priviledges unpackers are executed with clamav priviledges, which makes Clam Antivirus far more secure. It also makes sure, that clamav has read access to all scanned compressed files. You should enable recursive scanning with the -r option (-recursive), if you want to scan all contents of archives (with subdirectories), also all archives in archives will be recursively scanned - just everything. If files in archives are virus free the archive itself is scanned - just for prevention (it may not be an archive). Please look at the options below, each option has an optional argument - the absolute path to unpacker. If it can't be found in $PATH please supply it. Because Clam Antivirus uses the standard GNU options format, the long options with optional arguments, you must remember about the $=$ between option and argument. So the proper way to supply optional arguments is for example -unzip=/path/ to/unzip.

-unzip: zip is the most popular compression format. With this option all zipped files are scanned. If you turn on this option without the argument, the unzip program will be searched in $PATH. Clam Antivirus was tested with UnZip 5.41 of 16 April 2000, by Info-ZIP.
-unrar: Tested with UNRAR 2.50 freeware.
-unace: It uses options supported by UNACE v1.2 public version, not tested, but should work.
-unarj: Tested with UNARJ (Demo version) 2.41a.
-zoo: Tested with zoo 2.1.
-lha: Tested with LHa for Unix V 1.14e.
-jar: CA uses unzip for .jar files. Tested with UnZip 5.41 of 16 April 2000, by Info-ZIP.
-tar: This option supports non-compressed archives. Tested with GNU tar 1.13.17.
-deb: This option supports debian binary packages. Tested with GNU ar 2.12.90.0.14. Implies -tgz , but doesn't conflict with -tgz=FULLPATH.
-tgz: This option supports .tar.gz and .tgz files. You need GNU tar, on non-Linux system you probably have it as gtar and if this is in $PATH just use -tgz=gtar or supply the full path to this command as an argument.


next up previous
Next: Output format Up: Usage Previous: Usage
Tomasz Kojm 2002-08-22