adaway

Simple ad-blocking for GNU/Linux

Installation

Copy adaway script to /usr/local/sbin directory and run the following commands:

chown 0:0 /usr/local/sbin/adaway
chmod 750 /usr/local/sbin/adaway

Please note: /usr/local/sbin/ must be available in PATH. Otherwise copy script to /usr/sbin or /sbin directory

Ad Blocking

On first run this script will save /etc/hosts as /etc/hosts.local . This file later will be merged with ad-blocking rules as /etc/hosts .

Black and White lists

There are two files in /etc directory also made by this script on the first run:

/etc/hosts.wlist
/etc/hosts.blist

This files used for modifying /etc/hosts while merging ad-blocking rules

Each entry of black list will be added to /etc/hosts with 127.0.0.1 loopback address.

For example: to block banner from http://advert.example.com/banner.cgi=1, you must add only domain name advert.example.com - not IP address or full URL.

White list works in another way.

Each entry, containing any of the whitelisted domains will be removed from /etc/hosts

So, if you want to unblock ads from *.advert.example.com, it would be enough to write only advert.example.com or even example.com

Backups

On each run before any other actions this script makes backup of current hosts file in /var/backups/hosts.Y-m-d.gz file.

Use Privoxy instead of this script if you have /etc/hosts file of 2mb+

Acknowledgment