Followup-For: Bug #256588 Package: anacron Dear Maintainer,
It looked like my machine hadn't run anacron for many months, and for some undetermined reason, it wasn't reported. After some checks, I found in syslog : anacron: Error opening /etc/anacrontab: no such file or directory When I checked, the message was accurate. My first attempt was to ask apt-get to reinstall, in fact, I tried that before I found the cause in syslog. But the reinstall didn't paste a copy of anacrontab into /etc. I see that as a bug, which is why I'm filing this. I don't know why anacrontab got deleted. I had several attempts at recovering this machine from a bungled shutdown and restart, so many reasons are possible. While verifying cause and effect for this, I find that systemctl is now recognising the problem, systemctl --state=failed UNIT LOAD ACTIVE SUB DESCRIPTION ● anacron.service loaded failed failed Run anacron jobs ... more messages I think that on a reinstall of anacron, it should at least check whether /etc/anacrontab is there on the system, and report an error, or warning, if not. I've just noticed that a bunch of other anacron-related files are missing (see below) and I will hold off on fixing those until after I do some backups. -- System Information: Debian Release: 9.1 APT prefers stable APT policy: (500, 'stable') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Kernel: Linux 4.9.0-3-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_GB:en (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system) Versions of packages anacron depends on: pn debianutils <none> pn init-system-helpers <none> pn libc6 <none> pn lsb-base <none> Versions of packages anacron recommends: pn cron | cron-daemon <none> pn rsyslog | system-log-daemon <none> Versions of packages anacron suggests: pn default-mta | mail-transport-agent <none> pn powermgmt-base <none> -- Configuration Files: /etc/anacrontab [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/etc/anacrontab' /etc/apm/event.d/anacron [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/etc/apm/event.d/anacron' /etc/cron.daily/0anacron [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/etc/cron.daily/0anacron' /etc/cron.monthly/0anacron [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/etc/cron.monthly/0anacron' /etc/cron.weekly/0anacron [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/etc/cron.weekly/0anacron' /etc/default/anacron [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/etc/default/anacron' /etc/init.d/anacron [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/etc/init.d/anacron' /etc/init/anacron.conf [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/etc/init/anacron.conf' -- no debconf information