My preferred anti-virus system is ClamAV and I had trouble getting itrunning on macOS recently. Here’s how I got it going so if you’rerunning to the same issue, this should solve your problem.
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A Macintosh OS X anti-virus software that uses the ClamAV anti-virus library. The project's focus is on usability. Its purpose is to develop native GUI-based binary distributions of a ClamAV-based anti-virus software that behaves as OS X users expect. ClamXav for Mac, free and safe download. ClamXav latest version: Free virus checker using the ClamAV engine.
I will go through the steps I took and problems encountered. Thisarticle will take you less than three minutes to read.
To get ClamAV running on macOS, run: brew install clamav
Thanks to brew, open source software like ClamAV can run on multipleplatforms.
Normally, I would just run the application directly, in this case:clamav, but that does not exist. The main application is: clamscan
Hmm. What is going on here?
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After looking up the man page, man clamscan, one related package isfreshclam, that has a description:
freshclam - update virus databases
Aah - let’s run freshclam to update the definition!
Well, there’s no such file, or where do I get it? Is there a sample somewhere?
Well, it turns out I missed a critical line in the brew install, which was:
To finish installation & run clamav you will need to editthe example conf files at /usr/local/etc/clamav/
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🤦♂️ whoops! I didn’t even look (and only when writing up this article,I noticed it).
Let’s make the freshclam.conf file by running command:
Change the following in the file from:
To:
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Running the freshclam application again results in:
Great! Now macOS can scan virus too!
I can’t take credit for everything, I found this githubcommentthat basically describes the solution I presented.
I have this article as a way for me to remember but also remind myselfof apps that are better on Linux than macOS.
Getting ClamAV running on macOS isn’t that hard, but I was close togiving up!.
I love using open source software and macOS. As macOS is UNIX based,almost all open source software works on macOS.
There are times where just using Linux to run open source software isa better experience than macOS. ClamAV is one of those times.
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Hopefully, this post has helped you from giving up on open sourcesoftware!