Why don’t I have a simpler hobby like gardening or matchbook collecting? Computers can drive me insane some days.

I have this script on my Debian server which is supposed to run every day but every morning when I check my logs, I find it has failed to run. The script works fine when I run it manually. I have put it in the /etc/cron.daily directory with the correct permissions, but CRON just ignores it - what is going on ?

I was determined to find the problem today. And I did. You see CRON uses another program called run-parts to handle the process of scanning the directory and running each file contained within. After reading up a little and doing some tests, I found that run-parts will ignore any file which has a dot in it’s name. Coming from a DOS/Windows background, naturally I had named my file adam-daily.sh because it is a shell script. Removing the “.sh” fixed the problem.

This is the price I pay for not sufficiently dedicating my life to the UNIX way.