ClamD Fails To Start On CL6 Servers Due To Missing Library File

Symptoms

On CL6 servers, ClamAV fails to start with the following error message: 

/scripts/restartsrv_clamd --start
Service “clamd” is already stopped.
[...............]
Startup Log
/usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/bin/clamd: error while loading shared libraries: libpcre2-8.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

clamd has failed. Contact your system administrator if the service does not automagically recover.

Description

This is due to a missing shared library object (libpcre2-8.so.0) file that is required by ClamAV which you can confirm by this: 

ldd /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/bin/clamd
[...............]
libz.so.1 => /lib64/libz.so.1 (0x00007f64ae2db000)
libpcre2-8.so.0 => not found
libm.so.6 => /lib64/libm.so.6 (0x00007f64ae056000)
[...............]

The libpcre2-8.so.0 shared library file is provided by the pcre2 package. However that package fails to be installed as a dependency when ClamAV is installed on the server.

We've opened an internal case with our development team to investigate this further. For reference, the case number is CPANEL-38315. Follow this article to receive an email notification when a solution is published in the product. 

Workaround

To get around this issue, you can manually install the missing package and then restart ClamD: 

yum install pcre2

/scripts/restartsrv_clamd --start