Vista, MingW and AVG

Vista, MingW and AVG

Arthur Kalliokoski

Second in Command

February 2005

I've found that compiling a simple 'hello.c' with the command line
gcc -s hello.c -o hello.exe
makes AVG think it's a virus.
Adding the -O2 -Wall options doesn't do this.
Anybody else care to try it?

They all watch too much MSNBC... they get ideas.

Samuel Henderson

Member #3,757

August 2003

What version of Vista? I've got Home Premium and use MinGW regularly, however I don't have AVG, I use Symantec Endpoint Protection (where I work requires it be installed for VPN access).

I could probably throw AVG on here quickly enough to test though. What version of AVG was it? The free one?

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Paul whoknows: Why is this thread still open?
Onewing: Because it is a pthread: a thread for me to pee on.

Arthur Kalliokoski

Second in Command

February 2005

Vista Home Premium SP1
AVG Free Edition Ver. 8.5.375

I don't think Mingw is "making a virus", it's just kind a kind of comical misidentification. Send your enemies a "virus"!

They all watch too much MSNBC... they get ideas.

Jakub Wasilewski

Member #3,653

June 2003

I've had that once with a different antivirus and my own game compiled by MinGW. The "problem" disappeared when I've written more code for the executable .

It's just caused by the antivirus applying broad heuristics to executables, which sometimes results in false positives. Fortunately, changing a few bytes around (which will happen when you write some more code or change the existing lines) will make it register as safe again.

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Ron Novy

Member #6,982

March 2006

I have never had AVG pop up a warning like that on Vista...

Perhaps it is a virus on your computer that is infecting the executable after it is created. That has happened to me before, but it was on a Win98 machine and another on an XP machine...

Run the EXE through virustotal and see what you get...

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Oh... Bieber! I thought everyone was chanting Beaver... Now it doesn't make any sense at all. :-/

Arthur Kalliokoski

Second in Command

February 2005

I've also seen AVG complain about an innocent .ini file from a windows 95 game...

Ron Novy said:

Perhaps it is a virus on your computer that is infecting the executable after it is created.

Actually AVG is complaining about that dll that has libc in it, the actual exe is then able to weigh in at a svelte 5k.
Seems to me that the non-infected version with -O2 would use that same dll.

They all watch too much MSNBC... they get ideas.