How can I set F-PROT Antivirus up to automatically update the virus signature files?

To automatically update the virus signature files you can use the check-updates.pl perl script in conjunction with cron. Cron is a command scheduler. To schedule check-updates.pl to run periodically, you must create something called a crontab. Please consult your system manual to find out how.

The most common command for creating a crontab is 'crontab -e'. Running it will start an editor. You must fill in the time and date fields appropriately.

The time and date fields are:

field	allowed values
minute	0-59
hour	0-23
day of month	1-31
month	1-2 (or names, see below)
day of week	0-7 (0 and 7 are denote Sunday, you may also use names)

Example:

27 4,16 * * * /usr/local/f-prot/tools/check-updates.pl -cron

With this configuration, you will receive an e-mail whenever signature files are updated or when an error occurs. If you would like to receive e-mail only when an error occurs, then you need to include the -quiet parameter:

27 4,16 * * * /usr/local/f-prot/tools/check-updates.pl -cron -quiet

Please make sure you run check-updates.pl as root, otherwise it will not have filesystem permissions to update the virus database.

For further information, see F-PROT Antivirus Updater manual page.

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