Robustly disabling specific cron.{hourly,daily,weekly} script

Posted by benizi on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by benizi
Published on 2010-06-11T08:02:21Z Indexed on 2010/06/11 8:03 UTC
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cron

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cron.daily

On various systems that I administer, there are cron scripts that get run via the commonly-used /etc/cron.{hourly,daily,weekly} layout. What I want to know is whether there's any common 'disable this script' functionality.

Obviously, simply deleting something out of a given directory will disable it, but I'm looking for a more permanent solution. Deleting /etc/cron.daily/slocate will work to disable the nightly updatedb on my home machine (where I never use slocate), but next time I upgrade the slocate package, I'm pretty sure it'll reappear.

The two distributions I'm most interested in are Gentoo and OpenSUSE, but I'm hoping there's a widely-implemented mechanism. Both distros as I have them use vixie-cron (not sure it matters).

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