Do a quick system scan with ClamAV

Hey everyone, this is a short blog post about how to download ClamAV and run a scan on your system. (Windows)

Download ClamAV (no install)

First go to the GitHub Repository of ClamAV and download the latest release. Extract the contents of the zip file.

Downloading the ClamAV Databases

You need to create a config for freshclam.exe, you can just copy the example from the conf_examples folder and remove the “Example” line and change the folder for the database.

Now open up a terminal and navigate to the ClamAV folder and execute freshclam.exe. You will see that it downloads some files. After a few minutes it should be done.

Scanning your whole System

In the same terminal, run clamscan.exe with the recursive scanning parameter and the folder to scan.

So for a full system scan this would be: clamscan.exe --recursive C:\

More Information

For more information have a look at the ClamAV docs yourself