I have a thumb drive I use as a mobile maintenance and repair aid that also has ClamWin Portable on it. I don't run ClamWin as the primary AV on any of my PCs so I run FreshClam from command line to keep the ClamWin antivirus definition databases on the thumb drive updated. Sometime in the last few weeks the updates started failing. Dunno if it's significant but I notice the freshclam.exe file happens to be dated 1 October 2012.
The ClamWin is v0.97.6. The failure is occurring on both WinXPSP3 and Win7SP1. The command line I'm using is:
"G:\PortableApps\ClamWinPortable\App\clamwin\bin\freshclam.exe" --config-file="G:\PortableApps\ClamWinPortable\App\clamwin\bin\freshclam.conf"
The failure message is:
ERROR: Can't open \PortableApps\ClamWinPortable\Data\log in append mode (check permissions!).
ERROR: Problem with internal logger (UpdateLogFile = \PortableApps\ClamWinPortable\Data\log).
I don't find anything in the properties of the files, folders or SD drive involved to tell me what's causing this. I'm a member of the Administrators group but I also tried running the command as administrator and there was no change.
Any ideas?
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You should be able to just run FreshClam without any command line options to update it. A pre-configured FreshClam.conf is included with ClamWin Portable now that should not be edited. I just ran it in mine and it worked as expected. Be sure you have run ClamWinPortable.exe at least once to create everything in Data.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
The problem was my command line. I start the PA platform from a batch file/autorun so I can do things like test how long since the most recent antivirus definitions update, and only run FreshClam if it's been at least a couple of days.
Since the drive letter the thumb drive was assigned always was changing as I moved between PCs, I set the drive letter in my batch file to the variable "%CD%". When the ClamWin and FreshClam executables were v0.97.5.0, it worked okay using the command:
"%CD%PortableApps\ClamWinPortable\App\clamwin\bin\freshclam.exe"
Since the update to v0.97.6.0, however, it fails as noted. So I fell back to omitting the drive letter and just using "\PortableApps\ClamWin...", which works as advertised.
Sorry to bother you with a PICNIC error.