The libkavclient library is a C language interface to Kaspersky Anti-Virus Daemon™ (KAVDaemon), a part of Kaspersky Anti-Virus for Linux™, a popular anti-virus software from Kaspersky Lab (www.kaspersky.com).

KAVDaemon is a daemon process that runs in the background and can be asked to check specified files or memory regions for viruses. The advantage of KAVDaemon over the command-line virus checker kavscanner is that KAVDaemon loads virus databases into its memory only once, on startup, thus offering a significant speedup when checking a large number of files. Applications that wish to use KAVDaemon's services communicate to it via a Unix domain socket with a custom protocol defined by KAVDaemon. The libkavclient library encapsulates this protocol into a well-defined C API.

The libkavclient library is thread-safe (unless configured with --disable-reentrant option, see Appendix A) and is suitable for use in email, web, FTP and other network servers that need to check incoming data for viruses.

The libkavclient library is currently available for Linux. It should be easy to port it to other Unix-like systems for which KAVDaemon is available (such as FreeBSD, BSDi or Solaris), but this has not been done yet.

The libkavclient library is copyright © 2003 by Leonid Zeitlin <lz@europe.com>.

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License along with this library; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA

See http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html for the full text of the license.

Please notice that KAVDaemon is commercial software and must be purchased from Kaspersky Lab.