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Sophos Anti-Virus: checking compressed and archived files

When archive scanning is enabled, by default Sophos Anti-Virus checks inside files compressed with LZEXE, PKLITE, UUENCODE and DIET.

Sophos Anti-Virus can be configured to check a range of additional archive files, including those with the following extensions:

ARJ, Z, TAZ, GZ, TGZ, RAR, TAR, ZIP, LHA, LZH, ??_, EXE, BIN, HQX, UUE, BZ2, TBZ, TBZ2, SIT, CHM, HXS, RPM, A, CAB, XSN.

What to do

For the most up-to-date list of archive file types that Sophos Anti-Virus is able to scan, refer to the current Release notes for the command line interface.

Sophos recommends that scanning inside archive files is set to off (the default), because scanning inside archive files can cause scanning to slow. You can configure scanning inside archive files for both on-access and on-demand scans. For details of how to do this refer to the relevant documentation.

Archive and compressed files are decompressed to the following locations, where the Sophos Anti-Virus on-access scanner checks their contents:

If you need more information or guidance, then please contact technical support.