Hourly and daily crons are not running

Question

I've noticed that hourly and daily crons are not running, I moved them to crontab, and everything is fine:

#!/bin/bash

now=$(date)
echo 'It is '$now

The command line:

# run-parts --test /etc/cron.hourly

returned blank

EDIT:

# ls -lsAF
total 8
4 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 102 Apr  2  2012 .placeholder
4 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 254 Mar 18 06:52 testEcho*

Before the name was "testEcho**.sh**", I renamed it to "testEcho"

# run-parts --test /etc/cron.hourly
/etc/cron.hourly/testEcho

Now the value was returned, I will test it and get back to you

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

The hourly and daily (and also weekly, monthly)cron jobs are run by run-parts command. My /etc/crontab has:

17 *    * * *   root    cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.hourly
25 6    * * *   root    test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily )

The thing to note is that run-parts is very sensitive to file names. From man run-parts:

If neither the --lsbsysinit option nor the --regex option is given then the names must consist entirely of ASCII upper- and lower-case letters, ASCII digits, ASCII underscores, and ASCII minus-hyphens.

So as the file is named testEcho**.sh**, it fails the name checking of run-parts and hence run-parts ignores it.

You need to rename the file(s) to conform to the run-parts naming policy or you can execute the files directly by adding relevant entry in crontab.