For years I have wondered why exceptions can’t be entered using wildcards. Maybe Symantec thinks wildcards will be abused, but it would be very helpful in the management of exceptions, especially when Microsoft creates this document…
Virus scanning recommendations for Enterprise computers that are running currently supported versions of Windows
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/822158/en-us
… and has an entry like this (especially the bold one)…
Turn off scanning of Windows Update or Automatic Update related files
Turn off scanning of the Windows Update or Automatic Update database file (Datastore.edb). This file is located in the following folder:
%windir%\SoftwareDistribution\Datastore
Turn off scanning of the log files that are located in the following folder:
%windir%\SoftwareDistribution\Datastore\Logs
Specifically, exclude the following files:
Edb*.jrs
Edb.chk
Tmp.edb
The wildcard character (*) indicates that there may be several files.
I can’t easily accommodate this exception. I have to know and enter each and every file path starting with Edb and ending with .jrs. If these files to be excluded are created dynamically with filenames changing with numbers, etc. in the middle, I definitely can’t accommodate it. The most common requests that I can’t accommodate are for paths in user profiles. The username always changes, so I just have to skip that exception. Who knows how many files/applications I am locking up or corrupting by skipping.
Also, the example above says to exclude Edb*.jrs only in %windir%\SoftwareDistribution\Datastore\Logs. That is an extra twist – wildcard excluding some files/extensions in a specific directory. Right now SEP only allows entry of one of these at a time…
- specific filename
- specific directory
- specific extension
Not some files/extensions in a specific directory.