Every hour root gets a mail with the following message: /etc/cron.hourly/0anacron: cat: /var/spool/anacron/cron.daily: No such file or directory Yet when I try to look at that file it apparently exists: [root@nexus ~]# cat /var/spool/anacron/cron.daily 20090623 Is this some kind of race condition where the file gets deleted/re-created when this cron-job runs? Looking at /etc/anacrontab I can see that anacron is used to run the daily cron-jobs so removing it from the system or disabling is not an option but the constant "You have mail in /var/spool/mail/root" messages I get are somewhat annoying.
I saw it only once after installation. I'll fix the problem but you have something different. Do you have cronie, crontabs and anacron installed and which versions?
[dennis@nexus tripod]$ rpm -q cronie crontabs anacron cronie-1.3-1.fc11.x86_64 crontabs-1.10-29.fc11.noarch anacron-2.3-75.fc11.x86_64 This is a fresh F11 install with all updates applied except for 8 pulseaudio packages because audio works with the versions from fedora release but not the ones from the latest updates.
In case the file /var/spool/anacron/cron.daily exists, it shouldn't be sending emails. At least I can't reproduce this behaviour. The problem of non-existent file should be solved by rewrite of script. cat /etc/cron.hourly/0anacron #!/bin/bash #in case file doesn't exist if test -x /var/spool/anacron/cron.daily; then day=`cat /var/spool/anacron/cron.daily` fi if [ `date +%Y%m%d` = "$day" ]; then exit 0; fi # in case anacron is already running, # there will be log (daemon won't be running twice). if test -x /usr/bin/on_ac_power; then /usr/bin/on_ac_power &> /dev/null if test $? -eq 1; then exit 0 fi fi /usr/sbin/anacron -s And this should be working for you.