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<h2>9.8 DJGPP and Anti-Virus Software</h2>

<p><em><strong>Q</strong>: I upgraded my anti-virus software, and now it finds a virus in
all DJGPP programs!!</em>

<br><p>
<p><strong>A</strong>:  Relax, this is most probably a false alarm.  The DJGPP stub
loader, a short 2KB DOS program prepended to each DJGPP program, is
optimized for size, and employs some clever tricks to make its code
smaller.  A few over-zealous virus scanners take some of these tricks as
tell-tale signs of a virus, and report that all DJGPP programs are
infected.

<p>The truth is that DJGPP is distributed via SimTel.NET mirrors, which are
known to scan all binaries for viruses before the zip files are cleared
for general use.  In addition, many DJGPP packages are built on Unix
systems, where a DOS/Windows virus cannot survive.  So it is very
unlikely that a <em>real</em> virus would get through, and infect all of
the programs on top of that.  A couple of such false alarms were seen in
recent years, but all of them proved to be bugs in anti-virus programs.

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