Can I run F-Prot for DOS in XP's DOS window?

Franklin · External Since: Mar 08, 2005 Posts: 13

This message is not archived

badgolferman · External Since: Apr 05, 2006 Posts: 124

Franklin, 4/13/2005, 5:45:26 AM, wrote:

> Is it possible to run the free "F-Prot for DOS" in the DOS-emulation
> window of XP?
>
> I want to use "F-Prot for DOS" as an on-demand scanner to supplement
> my existing anti-virus software.

I have tried that, but it only gets so far before it quits. Your
better off using one of the other on-demand scanners available. Or you
could use one of the online scanners too.

--
No matter what happens someone will find a way to take it too seriously.

qwerty · External Since: Apr 13, 2005 Posts: 5

Franklin wrote:

> Is it possible to run the free "F-Prot for DOS" in the DOS-emulation
> window of XP?

Yes. I do it all the time on many XP machines. But get a better
virus-checker -- one that has realtime checking. F-Prot has its
uses but I wouldn't rely on it.

qwerty · External Since: Apr 13, 2005 Posts: 5

James Egan wrote:

> There are issues with it. It often doesn't scan all files even if you
> have a fat32 filesystem.

News to me... I've had nothing but success with it.

Zvi Netiv · External Since: May 01, 2005 Posts: 170

"qwerty" <qwerty.DeleteThis@qwerty.com> wrote:

> James Egan wrote:
>
> > There are issues with it. It often doesn't scan all files even if you
> > have a fat32 filesystem.
>
> News to me... I've had nothing but success with it.

In a DOS box dropped from NT, W2K or XP (where the limitation exists)? I very
much doubt it.

Regards, Zvi
--
NetZ Computing Ltd. ISRAEL www.invircible.com www.ivi.co.il (Hebrew)
InVircible Virus Defense Solutions, ResQ and Data Recovery Utilities

badgolferman · External Since: Apr 05, 2006 Posts: 124

qwerty, 4/13/2005, 7:35:01 AM, <425d03cf$1@dnews.tpgi.com.au> wrote:

> James Egan wrote:
>
> > There are issues with it. It often doesn't scan all files even if
> > you have a fat32 filesystem.
>
> News to me... I've had nothing but success with it.

Are you using NTFS or FAT32? If FAT32 then you must have upgraded from
a previous installation.

I wanted to use FPROT for DOS also on W2K or WXP systems, but all ours
are formatted NTFS. It begins the scan but doesn't get much past the
Documents and Settings folders. Even the DOS window shows all sorts of
scanning errors.

I'd like to know what your setup is and if you have examined the log
file carefully to see if scanning is truly being completed.

--
No matter what happens, someone will find a way to take it too
seriously.

Zvi Netiv · External Since: May 01, 2005 Posts: 170

"badgolferman" <REMOVETHISbadgolferman DeleteThis @gmail.com> wrote:

> qwerty, 4/13/2005, 7:35:01 AM, <425d03cf$1@dnews.tpgi.com.au> wrote:
>
> > James Egan wrote:
> >
> > > There are issues with it. It often doesn't scan all files even if
> > > you have a fat32 filesystem.

Apparently, the file/directory skip problem isn't related to the file system but
to the operating system you are running under. On my system, it's missing the
entire "\Program files" directory and its subs, when run from XP. The file
system is FAT-32 since it's a dual boot system (Win98/XP).

> > News to me... I've had nothing but success with it.
>
> Are you using NTFS or FAT32? If FAT32 then you must have upgraded from
> a previous installation.
>
> I wanted to use FPROT for DOS also on W2K or WXP systems, but all ours
> are formatted NTFS. It begins the scan but doesn't get much past the
> Documents and Settings folders. Even the DOS window shows all sorts of
> scanning errors.

The problem is the same with FAT/FAT-32, what counts is the OS you are running
under.

Regards, Zvi
--
NetZ Computing Ltd. ISRAEL www.invircible.com www.ivi.co.il (Hebrew)
InVircible Virus Defense Solutions, ResQ and Data Recovery Utilities

qwerty · External Since: Apr 13, 2005 Posts: 5

Zvi Netiv wrote:

>>> There are issues with it. It often doesn't scan all files even if
>>> you have a fat32 filesystem.
>>
>> News to me... I've had nothing but success with it.
>
> In a DOS box dropped from NT, W2K or XP (where the limitation
> exists)? I very much doubt it.

Unless you've seen me do it, don't tell me it doesn't work.

James Egan · External Since: Jan 19, 2006 Posts: 228

On Wed, 13 Apr 2005 21:55:39 +1000, "qwerty" <qwerty DeleteThis @qwerty.com>
wrote:

>Unless you've seen me do it, don't tell me it doesn't work.

For quite a while I thought it was an ntfs problem and was working
okay on fat32 only to find on closer inspection that it wasn't working
correctly all the time on all the machines. Look carefully at the
logs.

Jim.

Zvi Netiv · External Since: May 01, 2005 Posts: 170

"qwerty" <qwerty DeleteThis @qwerty.com> wrote:
> Zvi Netiv wrote:
>
> >>> There are issues with it. It often doesn't scan all files even if
> >>> you have a fat32 filesystem.
> >>
> >> News to me... I've had nothing but success with it.
> >
> > In a DOS box dropped from NT, W2K or XP (where the limitation
> > exists)? I very much doubt it.
>
> Unless you've seen me do it, don't tell me it doesn't work.

I suppose you won't argue with frisk, the author of F-Prot. It depends *what*
doesn't work. Scanning a specified file will work, on condition that its short
form pathname doesn't exceed the DOS limit of 79 characters (including the
filename).

What won't work is scanning all directories on a drive. For a reason that Frisk
explained here, a few years ago, F-Prot for DOS may miss directories and skip
them when scanning from the DOS box under NT derived OS (NT / W2K / XP). Frisk
also stated in that post that he did not plan to further develop the DOS
version.

I just checked for XP on FAT-32 and the last FP version for DOS missed the
entire "Program files" directory and its subs, when ordered to scan the entire
drive.

Regards, Zvi
--
NetZ Computing Ltd. ISRAEL www.invircible.com www.ivi.co.il (Hebrew)
InVircible Virus Defense Solutions, ResQ and Data Recovery Utilities

qwerty · External Since: Apr 13, 2005 Posts: 5

badgolferman wrote:

> I'd like to know what your setup is and if you have examined the log
> file carefully to see if scanning is truly being completed.

It's not my setup; I've used it on other people's PCs (friends, family)
for ages. Most of them have XP with FAT32. I concede I haven't checked
logs, but there weren't any error messages during the process either.

Franklin · External Since: Mar 08, 2005 Posts: 13

This message is not archived

Zvi Netiv · External Since: May 01, 2005 Posts: 170

Franklin <no_thanks.RemoveThis@mail.com> wrote:
> On Wed 13 Apr 2005 15:23:59, Zvi Netiv wrote:
>
> > I suppose you won't argue with frisk, the author of F-Prot. It
> > depends *what* doesn't work. Scanning a specified file will
> > work, on condition that its short form pathname doesn't exceed
> > the DOS limit of 79 characters (including the filename).
> >
> > What won't work is scanning all directories on a drive. For a
> > reason that Frisk explained here, a few years ago, F-Prot for
> > DOS may miss directories and skip them when scanning from the
> > DOS box under NT derived OS (NT / W2K / XP). Frisk also stated
> > in that post that he did not plan to further develop the DOS
> > version.
> >
> > I just checked for XP on FAT-32 and the last FP version for DOS
> > missed the entire "Program files" directory and its subs, when
> > ordered to scan the entire drive.
>
> Hello Zvi, I am the OP and I am interested in running F-Prot in XP's
> DOS emulation as an on-demand scanner specifically for individual
> folders, individual files or individual zip archives.
>
> I want to do this in order to get an extra "opinion" on the
> likelihood of the

Of what? Seems that you pushed "send" prematurely. Wink

> Do you see any other problems with using F-Prot for DOS for this
> (apart from the 79 character name you mention)?

The max length for the DOS pathname, actually 67 characters (pathname, less the
file name) for the *fully qualified* directory string (wildcards are not allowed
in directory specification) is not a light limitation.

Another troublesome handicap of F-Prot for DOS is its inability to properly
parse long filenames in the command line. Try the command F-PROT "C:\PROGRAM
FILES" and see what happens. You must pass to F-Prot the correct and full DOS
equivalent of the pathname or it will not find the directory where to start the
scan!

Another limitation that I noticed is that F-Prot for DOS doesn't interpret
properly file / directory names that contain characters that aren't in its
default characters set. This problem manifests itself more under certain
localized OS versions, e.g. Hebrew for example.

See my other post in this thread for a few suggestions.

Regards, Zvi
--
NetZ Computing Ltd. ISRAEL www.invircible.com www.ivi.co.il (Hebrew)
InVircible Virus Defense Solutions, ResQ and Data Recovery Utilities

Franklin · External Since: Mar 08, 2005 Posts: 13

This message is not archived

B. R. 'BeAr' Ederson · External Since: Apr 14, 2005 Posts: 1

On Thu, 14 Apr 2005 13:57:34 GMT, Franklin wrote:

> I am interested in running F-Prot in XP's
> DOS emulation as an on-demand scanner specifically for individual
> folders, individual files or individual zip archives.
>
> I want to do this in order to get an extra "opinion" on the
> likelihood of the
>
> Do you see any other problems with using F-Prot for DOS for this
> (apart from the 79 character name you mention)?

Just to give you an additional opinion on your question: I've been using
F-Prot (DOS) as on-demand scanner on *top level* Download directories
for (many, many) years. In this time I never encountered a problem on
either FAT32 or NTFS.

It has always been my habit to watch the output of the scanner *and* to
create a log file. If I somehow get the feeling that I missed something
on the direct visual inspection I always cross-check the log. Besides,
I let the console window auto-close a few seconds after scan. But I set
an editor window to unconditionally pop up the log if the errorlevel of
F-Prot is not 0 on exit...

I think you can use likewise precautions if you don't need to check very
huge amounts of files. In fact: You furthermore could create a setup
to automatically test a filtered output of the F-Prot log file against a
directory listing of files (short names necessary!).

This way you should get a setup which should be sufficient for the
'extra opinion' scenario you described. Problems related to localized
OS versions (like Zvi described) should show up after a few tests (if
a substantial part of your files is affected). Than you really should
drop the F-Prot solution. In all other cases you just should take a
more carefully watch at the results of scans if files with unusual
characters appear...

HTH.
BeAr
--
===========================================================================
= What do you mean with: "Perfection is always an illusion"? =
===============================================================--(Oops!)===

qwerty · External Since: Apr 13, 2005 Posts: 5

null DeleteThis @zilch.com wrote:

> If F-Prot DOS put up error messages when it can't scan a folder or
> whole set of subdirectories, people wouldn't have been fooled into
> thinking it was scanning them Smile

* * Chas · External Since: Aug 27, 2005 Posts: 178

"Franklin" <no_thanks RemoveThis @mail.com> wrote in message
news:9638C3F8AD37171F3M4@204.153.244.156...
<snip>
> ==================== START QUOTE =====================
> The problem I have is that I don't want to get another AV which gets
> installed "deeply".
>
> At present, I use AVG as my main AV and if I right-click certain
> files which I have downloaded, then AVG sometimes says "Virus
Found".
>
> I also have got Avast installed but I have not installed any of what
> Avast calls its "Provider Services" (such as Standard Shield,
> Resident Protection, Incoming Email Scanning, Web Shield, P2P
> Protection). This means that I can right-click a file and get Avast
> to scan it.
>
> HOWEVER ... Avast and AVG do not seem to agree a great deal on which
> files are viruses. I know that heuristics (guessing) can be
involved
> in virus detection but, even so, there appear to be far too many
> disagreements between AVG and Avast. Avast seems to
> miss genuine viruses which AVG can find.
>
> I think Avast and AVG may be interacting somewhere down in the
bowels
> of my system. As a result I would like to have a purely on-demand
AV
> file/folder scanner which doesn't install itself as deeply as
> conventional AV scanners do.
>
> And that is why I thought of using F-Prot in the DOS emulation
> window. It was a way of keeping F-Prot for DOS a long way away from
> the other two AV programs.
>
> Maybe there are better (free) alternatives to F-Prot for DOS which
> people here can suggest? Maybe Clamwin? Clamwin is often referred
> to as having the disadvatage of not having a resident shield but
> maybe it would be suitable for me? The trouble is I don't know
which
> AV installs itself deeply and which AV doesn't.
>
> I want to avoid any conflicts between AV programs due to AV
> installation routines which involve significant registry changes,
> recondite autostart embedding, detecting & preventing other AV
> software from loading, exclusive locking of drivers & DLLs,
> overwriting key files of other AV program and all that stuff.
>
> ==================== END QUOTE =====================

You will probably need to disable AVG's full time scanner when you run
F-Prot because it will detect what it sees as a virus when F-Prot
tries to access the file which will defeat your purpose.

I run F-Prot from desktop Icons to check specific folders or drives,
for example my floppy drive:

C:\F-PROT\F-PROT.EXE A:\ /ARCHIVE /PACKED /BEEP /DUMB
--
Chas. verktyg RemoveThis @aol.spamski.com (Drop spamski to E-mail me)

* * Chas · External Since: Aug 27, 2005 Posts: 178

"Zvi Netiv" <support.DeleteThis@replace_with_domain.com> wrote in message
news:r4lu51tctjqkvo5o37i8ko14tfigku5u14@4ax.com...
> Franklin <no_thanks.DeleteThis@mail.com> wrote:
<snip>

> I don't think that multiple on-demand scanners are a good idea nor
necessary (in
> case of an ambiguity you can always try online inspection, like
VirusTotal) but
> you made your requirements very clear.

Zvi,

I've run into enough false positives over the years to feel a need for
at least 1 backup AV scanner.

I had a weird thing happen last year. I still have the final update of
Dr. Solomons installed on one of my older systems. I ran across some
malware that overwrote my Notepad.exe.

The heuristics in the old Dr. Solomons was the only thing I had that
identified the particular WM32 virus that caused the problem (it was
weeks before NAV, KAV and F-Prot listed this specific villain).
--
Chas. verktyg.DeleteThis@aol.spamski.com (Drop spamski to E-mail me)

Zvi Netiv · External Since: May 01, 2005 Posts: 170

"* * Chas" <dnafutz.DeleteThis@aol.spam.com> wrote:
> "Zvi Netiv" <support.DeleteThis@replace_with_domain.com> wrote in message

> > I don't think that multiple on-demand scanners are a good idea nor necessary (in
> > case of an ambiguity you can always try online inspection, like VirusTotal) but
> > you made your requirements very clear.
>
> Zvi,
>
> I've run into enough false positives over the years to feel a need for
> at least 1 backup AV scanner.

You should be new to this newsgroup to tell me this. Wink

My position, for
years, has been that you don't need even a single scanner to keep your system
protected from malware. The use for scanners, in my view, is the identification
of affecting malware, and cleaning from. Detection and prevention are better
handled by generic means without depending on critical updates. A white paper
that describes that approach is available from www.invircible.com/item/65

Scanners have their use as stated above, but you need not tying yourself to any
particular product for that purpose, you can always submit the suspicious
sample, detected by generic means, for online inspection, and then choose the
best available removal tool for the particular malware. In many cases there
will be no dedicated cleaner yet and the generic means will be the only thing
available to contain the attack.

> I had a weird thing happen last year. I still have the final update of
> Dr. Solomons installed on one of my older systems. I ran across some
> malware that overwrote my Notepad.exe.
>
> The heuristics in the old Dr. Solomons was the only thing I had that
> identified the particular WM32 virus that caused the problem (it was
> weeks before NAV, KAV and F-Prot listed this specific villain).

I wouldn't draw any operational conclusions from that anecdotal event. If
curious, then read in www.invircible.com/item/81 how to generally handle PE
infectors without depending on virus definition updates.

Regards, Zvi
--
NetZ Computing Ltd. ISRAEL www.invircible.com www.ivi.co.il (Hebrew)
InVircible Virus Defense Solutions, ResQ and Data Recovery Utilities

Sir Nigel Puke-Fuui · External Since: Apr 18, 2005 Posts: 3

On 18 Apr 2005 04:20:31 -0500, Howard Schwartz <howardbschwartz4 DeleteThis @yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> If you have a fat-32 file system, I do not see why you
> can not simply start your PC with a floppy running
> some version of real mode dos 7x, and use F-Prot with
> no problems: The program should have no problem with
> filenames in this case.
>
I have been using exactlly this method with F-prot for several
years now and it works perfectly. I use DOS-7 borrowed from
my Windows 95 laptop to produce a boot disk. F-prot itself is
too big to run from a floppy so it has its own directory on the C-drive.

> Is it that the dos version of F-Prot does not know
> the virus signatures of programs that run only under
> XP? No - that could not be true, since the data
> tables are the same as for the shareware version, yes?
>
I use two signature files, fp-def.zip and macrdef2.zip.
It only takes a few minutes to download them from
F-Prot's FTP server and un-zip them to the f-prot directory
on the C:drive. I also keep a copy of the EICAR virus
test file stashed somewhere on the hard drive and
expect to see it detected whenever F-prot is run.