With my last post, I talked about how to install ClamAV (Clam Anti-Virus) for Linux on CentOS 7. And yet, I was not able to get the clamd daemon to run without errors. Every time I ran clamd, I got a permission error. I verified the file permissions and folder permissions. I suspect it has something to do with the security context and selinux. I may investigate this further later, but for now all I really wanted was a daily scan anyway. The clamd daemon has additioanl features like real-time virus scanning and scanning incoming e-mails. But for my current use that is not applicable.

I found this article over at CentOS blog.  He has a pretty simple article about how to install it and set up a simple daily cron job which runs “clamscan” at midnight every day.  His article is for the older CentOS 6 version and needs to be slightly modified for CentOS7 and the associated version of ClamAV.  So here it is:

1.  Create a cron.daily file:
   vi /etc/cron.daily/clamscan_daily
   #!/bin/bash
SCAN_DIR="/home"
LOG_FILE="/var/log/clamscan.log"
/usr/bin/clamscan -i -r $SCAN_DIR >> $LOG_FILE

2. Change the permissions on the file to executable:
   chmod +x /etc/cron.daily/clamscan_daily

And that is pretty much it. Of course one could make a cron entry in the crontab to run the scan as often as needed.  But that’s the basics to set up a daily scan of your server or system.