Clamav for Ubuntu

Clamav is a free and open source virus scanning tool. For personal use Installing clamav is pretty straightforward, there's a version that runs in user space:

apt-get install clamav

Run freshclam to update the signatures:

sudo freshclam

Then to scan the system, use clamscan.

clamscan -r --bell -i --max-filesize=500M --max-scansize=500M \

   --max-recursion=30 /afs/cs.unc.edu/home/hays

The command above will scan my home directory, all files up to 500 megs in size, up to 30 levels down. There are lots of other options.

If you would like to use a GUI for running clamav, install clamtk. It's a good option in that you can use it to schedule regular scans if you're not comfortable with the command line and cron.

There is also a version that runs as a daemon, to use it instead install clamav-daemon and run scans with clamdscan instead of clamscan.