If this file does not exist, then is it something that needs to be created?
Yes. The CLAM client will create the folder for you automatically, and will create a wallet.dat file inside the folder too, but it will never create the clam.conf file. You need to do that for yourself. It's possible that on some operating systems the installation program will create an example clam.conf for you. I've never see that happen though.
Files that have names that start with a "." are "hidden" by default. So, in a terminal, you'll have to specify -l (to ls) in order to see them.
You probably know this, but it's 'ls -a' not 'ls -l' to show hidden files.