I have no great love for those individuals who create virus programs to wreck havoc on the work of others and I have always wanted to design a way for an application to check itself for infections prior to running. The enclosed files will not protect all applications against all viruses but they will allow developers to add some measure of protection to their programs. The files included are:
•virusCheck.p--This is a Think’s Pascal unit which contains the routines necessary to allow an Application to check its resources for any changes. Before an application is compiled for the last time this unit should be included in the project and a line similar to the following added to the beginning of the mainline:
if not(ApplicationCanRun) then
begin
{Do any Clean-up here}
Halt;
end;
The next time your application is run it will check its resource fork for a resource which contains a list of resource types and counts. The default is a resource type of “Vchk” with an ID of 128. This resource must be created and added to your application’s resource fork. The virusCheck.p unit also needs ALRT and DITL resources both with an ID of 6000 to display the necessary dialogs if a virus is detected. A sample resource file is included for your inspection. Alternatively you can use the Vaccinate Program to add all of these resources automatically.
•VirusChk.rscs--This is a sample resource file.
•Vaccinate--This program will add all of the necessary resources to your application so that it can do a self check whenever the application runs.
These files are free. I ask only that you keep them together along with this Read Me file.
Comments are welcome. E-mail address is PatrickG21 (America Online) or 4247 Vernor Rd. Attica MI 48412.
