Posts Tagged ‘debian’

I typically use /etc/cron.d to store all of my system crontabs. I recently ran into an issue that I had either not run into before, or fixed and paid no attention to. Files stored in /etc/cron.d/ or any /etc/cron.* directory need to adhear to the run-parts Debian cron script namespace which consists is

(^[a-z0-9][a-z0-9-]*$)

for the regex impared this does not include the dot character. If you have a file in /etc/cron.d/ that has a dot in it it will not be evaluated by cron. I have seen mention of underscore not being valid but in my testing underscore was not an issue, only dots.

Recently I ordered a server with Debian etch. Unfortunately during testing I noticed that startx was on the system, along with a whole slew of other junk that I don’t generally want on a fresh server. I wanted to remove all of the cruft but I didn’t have the exact package list. (more…)