SABnzbd Forums

Before using SABnzbd I used to use a double safe method of downloading RARS on my PC and virus scanning them before even opening them.

Then once I'd extracted the data I would then scan the extracted files.

However now that I have SABnzbd running on my Linux NAS box I like the convenience of everything already being shown on a shared drive (which I then virus scan).

I there any potential risk in allowing SABnzd to perform the auto extraction or would it be better to disable this function and scan,extract,rescan the RARs SABnzbd has downloaded?

If it runs on a Linux box, you should be safe.
If you don't run executables, there's no danger.
There are such things as malicious mp3, jpg etc files, but these are rare and seldom target Linux systems.
As long as you don't "look" at these files with Windows before scanning them, there's no problem.
Having said that, no virus scanner has 100% coverage, especially not of malicious data files.

You can always run a post-processing script that passes the directory to ClamAV to scan, and moves the offending files to another location (or deletes them).