My desktop using Linux Mint 19.2 cinnamon was slowing down so I thought I am being hacked so loaded clamav. When I did sudo freshclam this was the error message.

sudo freshclam
[sudo] password for me:
ERROR: /var/log/clamav/freshclam.log is locked by another process
ERROR: Problem with internal logger (UpdateLogFile = /var/log/clamav/freshclam.log).

Clamav will not run either.

I installed a new Mint 19.2 on a new SSD and used a different internet connection over a mobile phone network to be sure I was using a different IP address.

The first thing I downloaded was ClamAV. It is exactly the same.

How can I find the process that has locked freshclam and stopped Clamav running?

Is there anything else I can do to check for virus or being hacked?

Thanks

it doesn't necessarily mean you've been hacked; my guess is that clamav was already running either due to auto update or you otherwise invoked it . If that was the case that would explain already locked . Basically you can look into seeing what processes are
running , killing them and then running manually .

Tools to see if you have malware include rkhunter , chkrootkit

No I had never run clamav on either of these hard drives so I suspect it has to do with 19.2 as it did work on earlier versions 18.3

Tools to see if you have malware include rkhunter , chkrootkit Thanks will try these.

You can try the following command to see what program has /var/log/clamav/freshclam.log opened;

Tried that and had this error

lsof | grep -i freshclam.log
lsof: WARNING: can't stat() tracefs file system /sys/kernel/debug/tracing
Output information may be incomplete.

first step, make sure the log file exists and is writable.
If not, create that file.

It is not write
able see my earlier posts