How to stop/disable ClamAV service on CentOS?

ClamAV antivirus can use many hardware resources (memory or CPU) and its use should be avoided in Linux systems with limited resources. If you want to disable ClamAV antivirus on your CentOS system, we recommend following the instructions below.

How to disable ClamAV service

- First, stop the ClamAV scanner by running the following command:

# service clamd stop

- Second, to enable and disable services in Red Hat based distributions, the chkconfig script is used. Run the following commands to disable the ClamAV scanner at system startup:

# chkconfig clamd off 
# chkconfig clamd --del

- Finally, after deactivating ClamAV, check its status. Run the following command to check if ClamAV is disabled at startup or not. If ClamAV is successfully deactivated, the following command will not return any results:

#chkconfig --list | grep clam

At the next reboot the system will start without the ClamAV service, thus reducing the use of system resources, and your server will be faster as well.

How to disable other unwanted services

You can execute the command presented in step 2 to disable other unwanted packages and applications from your CentOS system.

Run the following command that will list all the services and identify the names of the services you want to disable. The command will display all the services and their state at startup, at each running level:

# chkconfig --list

After you have identified the service name, run the command from step 2, replacing the service name with clamd.

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