ClamAV is an open-source antivirus scanner, which can be downloaded on its website. It’s not particularly great, although it does have its uses (like as a free antivirus for Linux). If you’re looking for a full-featured antivirus, ClamAV won’t be good for you. For that, you’ll need one of the best antiviruses of 2020. In last update, Clam AntiVirus developer team introduced JIT compiler to ClamAV® 0.96. Apple gcc (version: 4.0.1 build: 5370) in Mac OS X 10.4 (aka Tiger) failed to build ClamAV 0.96.x and 0.98.x with JIT compiled in.
Clam AV has traditionally lacked any real time protection. After Cisco took over the project they have a version with Immunet, but it's very basic. Nothing close to any of the commercial vendors like Kaspersky, ESET, Bitdefender and so on. Also Clam AV detection rate for in the wild has not been that great. Viruses can attack your computer via emails, so ClamCour is like a courier filter which will allows Clam Antivirus to scan incoming mail for viruses and it rejects the mail if the check is positive. With version 0.3.8 you can effectively detect and delete viruses found in your mail. ClamAV ® is the open source standard for mail gateway scanning software.
Installing
ClamAV can be found for Ubuntu in the apt repository. Run this command to install ClamAV:
apt-get install clamav
If you need clamd, you may also want to run:
apt-get install clamav-daemon
If you require support for scanning compressed RAR files you first need to enable the non-free archive, and then you can install the RAR-plugin using:
apt-get install libclamunrar6
There are two classes of clamav packages available for Ubuntu users:
Released Set
The released set (release, *-updates, and *-security) are patched for security updates. Following extensive testing of clamav and the packages that use it in the backports repository, they may be updated to a newer version. These are official Ubuntu packages and supported by community developers.
Backports
Clam Mac Antivirus App
The Ubuntu backports repository will contain the newest clamav version that has been at least lightly tested to work with that version. These packages can be installed by enabling the backports repository on your system.
Ubuntu packages are maintained by Ubuntu MOTU Developers.