Quick tip: What to do when cron skips certain scripts

Many Unix/Linux distros come with cron already configured and a set of directories to drop your scripts in: /etc/cron.hourly, /etc/cron.daily, /etc/cron.weekly, and /etc/cron.monthly, depending on how frequently you want them to run.

This normally works just great, but my debian-based (Ubuntu) server wouldn't run some of the cron scripts that I had copied from my previous (CentOS) setup.

It turns out that this distro's "run-parts" command (which is called from crontab) skips scripts with a period (.) in the name, so my drupal.cron script never ran.

I simply renamed the script from drupal.cron to drupal and it runs "like clockwork".

The reason run-parts ignores the scripts with a period in the name is that, unless the LSB (Linux Standard Base) option is evoked, then, per the man page:

If neither the --lsbsysinit option nor the --regex option is given then the names must consist entirely of upper and lower case letters, digits, underscores, and hyphens.