Performance exclusions

This feature allows you to exclude files and folders from scanning. Performance exclusions are useful to exclude file-level scanning of mission critical applications or when scanning causes abnormal system behavior or decreases performance.

Path

Excludes specific path (file or directory) for this computer. Do not use wildcards – asterisk (*) in the middle of a path. See the following Knowledgebase article for more information.

note

To exclude folder contents, do not forget to add the asterisk (*) at the end of the path (C:\Tools\*).

C:\Tools will not be excluded, because from the scanner's perspective, Tools can also be a filename.

Comment

Add an optional Comment to easily recognize the exclusion in the future.

example

Path exclusions using an asterisk:

C:\Tools\* – path must end with the backslash (\) and asterisk (*) to indicate that it is a folder and all folder content (files and subfolders) will be excluded

C:\Tools\*.* – the same behavior as C:\Tools\* which means, it works recursively

C:\Tools\*.dat – will exclude dat files in the Tools folder

C:\Tools\sg.dat – will exclude this specific file located in the exact path

example

To exclude all files in a folder, type the path to the folder and use the mask *.*. To exclude doc files only, use the mask *.doc.

If the name of an executable file has a certain number of characters (and characters vary) and you only know the first one for certain (say “D”), use the following format:

D????.exe (question marks replace the missing / unknown characters)

example

Use system variables like %PROGRAMFILES% to define scan exclusions.

To exclude the Program Files folder using this system variable, use the path %PROGRAMFILES%\ (make sure to add the backslash at the end of path when adding to exclusions)

To exclude all files in a %HOMEDRIVE% subdirectory, use the path %HOMEDRIVE%\Excluded_Directory\*.*

The following variables can be used in the path exclusion form:

%ALLUSERSPROFILE%

%COMMONPROGRAMFILES%

%COMMONPROGRAMFILES(X86)%

%COMSPEC%

%HOMEDRIVE%

%HOMEPATH%

%PROGRAMFILES%

%PROGRAMFILES(X86)%

%SystemDrive%

%SystemRoot%

%WINDIR%

%PUBLIC%

User-specific system variables (like %TEMP% or %USERPROFILE%) or environment variables (like %PATH%) are not supported.