Update ClamAV in Ubuntu..

First of all.. Visit the ClamAV website for the latest definitions (you have to right click and choose save link as… on the menu) and save them in your home directory, or just open up a terminal and do this..

wget http://db.local.clamav.net/main.cvd

then..

wget http://db.local.clamav.net/daily.cvd

and..

sudo mv daily.cvd main.cvd /var/lib/clamav

Which will move the newly downloaded files to the correct /var/lib/clamav directory.
Now enter your admin password & you should have completely up to date virus definitions :D

WARNING: This will only work if the ClamAV team use the same link every time for the daily updates?

To keep up to date with the definitions then, open a terminal &

wget http://db.local.clamav.net/daily.cvd

Which will download the latest definitions to your home directory, then..

sudo mv daily.cvd /var/lib/clamav

..to transfer them to the correct directory again.

Just found this out myself and it should help you all out :)

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    • ybertto
    • July 4th, 2008

    when I try sudo it ask me my password and when I try to type it doesn’t work. How should I manage please ?

    • joe
    • July 26th, 2008

    type your password – nothing will show up, but just type it anyway, then press enter

    • Patrick
    • August 15th, 2008

    Why aren’t you just typing “freshclam” as root (or sudo)??? Also, the included service clamav-freshclam will do this for you at boot time. This process you list hurts my head..

  1. FreshClam doesn’t always seem to work, so this is for people who want to do it manually :)

    • Jay
    • March 10th, 2009

    I got the updates and everything, just had to put sudo before wget. Also it did not update the definition in the program though.. it says i have to be root still in the gui part. or how do i do the command line version to run the scan or add those new definitions? freshclam does not work.. im useing ubuntu hardy heron

  2. thank you for good informations

  3. thanks a lot for informations!!! All the best

    • FaDeL
    • August 31st, 2009

    Thanks
    I wonder how to scan with clamav, is there any GUI?

    • Joe
    • September 1st, 2009

    sudo apt-get install clamtk :)

    • Geir
    • September 11th, 2009

    Freshclam issues: in my experience, freshclam fails because it has uncommented proxy lines in /etc/clamav/freshclam.conf Just comment out these, and it should work just fine.

  4. And thanks again :) nicely done …

    If you do it manually, just create a script to freshen up your clamav main & daily cvd’s. Then you don’t need freshclam
    But… after altering freshclam.conf its working also good … so in the end we have 3 nice solutions :)

    - manually update main&daily
    - make a script that does the manualy part of updating
    - alter freshclam.conf and use freshclam

    NICE :)

    • waydaws
    • March 14th, 2011

    If you’re going to do this way, you should probably grab the bytecode.cvd and the safebrowsing.cvd using wget too.

    • thulani
    • July 30th, 2012

    Thanks guys it worked perfectly for me

  1. October 13th, 2009

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