| This article is being maintained as archived information. Most virus scanning applications no longer have a scanner that can be configured within WinZip. Active scanning of new files has eliminated the former need for this WinZip feature, to a large degree. WinZip 10.0 and earlier can be configured to work with antivirus applications that do provide the necessary scanner. You will need to know the command line parameters used to invoke the scanner. |
Do not use WinZip's virus scanning support with different virus scanners unless you have read and understood the following information. To configure WinZip to work with a scanner, fill in the following fields in the Program Locations tab of the Configuration dialog:
- The Scan Program field should contain the name of the program (the full path name is required if the program is not in a folder specified in your PATH= environment variable).
- The Parameters field should contain the appropriate parameters to run the virus scanner as described below.
- The Run Minimized box determines whether the scanner should be run as an icon. See below for important notes on using this parameter with DOS based scanners. Note that the NAVW32.EXE scanner always runs minimized, regardless how you set this option.
Special character sequences for the Parameters field are:
- *.* indicates where WinZip should substitute the drive, folder, and the *.* characters for the files that are to be scanned. For example, "c:\temp\dir\*.*".
- %d indicates where WinZip should substitute the drive and folder of the files that are to be scanned. Note that the wild card characters *.* are NOT included when you use %d.
- %f indicates where WinZip should substitute the name of a temporary "report file". Report files should ONLY be used when running DOS virus scanners.
- %wscan a special parameter required for McAfee's WSCAN program.
If you do not specify any of the aforementioned special character sequences WinZip will append the filenames to be scanned at the end of the scanner command line.
Be sure to specify any parameters necessary to cause the scanner to check folders of the drive and folder of the files that are to be scanned.
To configure WinZip for a Windows based virus scanner, first ascertain that the virus scanner reports suspected viruses by displaying a dialog box. If the scanner simply writes to a log file when a virus is found you (and WinZip) will not know about the problem.
To configure WinZip for a DOS based virus scanner, be sure to verify that the scanner can either be used with the Run Minimized option (see below for details) or issues a prompt if a virus is found. If neither of these conditions is met and a virus is found you (and WinZip) will not know about the problem.
The Run Minimized check box should only be used for DOS scanners under the following circumstances:
- The scanner is configured to run in "batch" mode, without any prompts. If the scanner requires any keyboard input when running as an icon, you will not be able to see the prompts, and the session will appear to be hung.
- The scanner writes all messages through DOS, or has an option to write results to a report file. Messages written directly to the video buffer are not captured by WinZip and will be lost. To determine whether a scanner writes messages through DOS, run the scanner with its output redirected (for example, issue the command "scan > nul"). Any messages you see during this test will not be captured by WinZip. If the scanner has an option to write results to a report file you can use %f in the Parameters field to cause WinZip to capture the results (see above for details).
- The scanner returns a non-zero error level if it encounters any problems. If the scanner does not return a non-zero error level, WinZip will assume that the files passed the virus check, and any warnings issued by the scanner will be lost. (Note: if the scanner returns a non-zero error level, WinZip automatically displays all messages written to standard error or standard output.)
