How to stop automatic freshclam execution

Solution 1:

Related to https://askubuntu.com/a/1204422/231142

That is the freshclam daemon running that is causing that error message. If you check the log, tail -10 /var/log/clamav/freshclam.log you will probably see updates for the freshclam as early as today. As long as you're seeing updates, everything is working fine. I actually don't recommend disabling it as you might forget to update later on.

If you want to change the intervals to the freshclam daemon, type in the following from a terminal window:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure clamav-freshclam

then step through the setup. In the setup, it asks how many times a day for it to update. It defaults to 24 (once per hour). If you want it to update more, set it for 48 (twice per hour). 12 for once every 2 hours.

Solution 2:

I know this already has an accepted answer, but in my case it didn't help:
any dpkg-reconfigure setting freshclam to manual updates would result in a running daemon after rebooting, no matter what.

what did the trick for me was disabling it from init.d completely, with this line:

 sudo update-rc.d clamav-freshclam disable

hope this will be of help to anyone running in my same issues