At first, cron.hourly (which has ONLY the .placeholder ) was erroring and sending an email telling me that it could not find root, which was in the user field of /etc/crontab... reading man pages later, I tried `cp -p /etc/crontab /etc/old.crontab` and then `crontab -e` and removed root from user field... I checked /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root and after the edit to remove "root" from the entry, I found:
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# DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE - edit the master and reinstall.
# (/tmp/crontab.cwzBzw/crontab installed on Thu Jan 9 08:28:57 2020)
# (Cron version -- $Id: crontab.c,v 2.13 1994/01/17 03:20:37 vixie Exp $)
# Edit this file to introduce tasks to be run by cron.
#
# Each task to run has to be defined through a single line
# indicating with different fields when the task will be run
# and what command to run for the task
#
# To define the time you can provide concrete values for
# minute (m), hour (h), day of month (dom), month (mon),
# and day of week (dow) or use '*' in these fields (for 'any').
#
# Notice that tasks will be started based on the cron's system
# daemon's notion of time and timezones.
#
# Output of the crontab jobs (including errors) is sent through
# email to the user the crontab file belongs to (unless redirected).
#
# For example, you can run a backup of all your user accounts
# at 5 a.m every week with:
# 0 5 * * 1 tar -zcf /var/backups/home.tgz /home/
#
# For more information see the manual pages of crontab(5) and cron(8)
#
# m h dom mon dow command
17 * * * * cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.hourly
25 6 * * * cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily
47 6 * * 7 cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.weekly
52 6 1 * * cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.monthly
#
1 0 * * 3 cp -p /etc/wed_motd /etc/motd
1 0 * * 0-2,4-6 cp -p /etc/old_motd /etc/motd
#
20 22 5,9,13,17,22,27 * * /usr/local/bin/B4BU
32 22 5,9,13,17,22,27 * * /usr/local/bin/runBU
2 0 1 * * /usr/local/bin/L_B4BU
12 0 1 * * /usr/local/bin/L_runBU
#
I tried removing crontab, but cron goes nuts every minute and will soon overflow log files:
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Jan 13 12:56:01 DebServ cron[854]: (CRON) STAT FAILED (/etc/crontab)
Jan 13 12:57:01 DebServ cron[854]: (CRON) STAT FAILED (/etc/crontab)Others have suggested rebooting, but the runBU jobs do reboot the machine so that filesystem SDA2 is backed up clean. I have exhausted my thinking and need some new ideas for getting the twice running jobs to get pared down to running once. A final thought: the machine is on 24/7, so anacron really isn't needed. What REALLY is the impact of purging the anacron package?
Don't even have anacron installed on Buster.