Jon Peatfield wrote:

> That seems somewhat unlikely given that crond doesn't look in there.  
> Can you replicate it?  Of course it *might* be an error from run-parts 
> but if the directory is empty that is probably a bug.
>
> Of course if /etc/cron.hourly/ is empty then one can also comment out 
> the relevant /etc/crontab line -- we do this since we don't want a 
> null cron job starting every hour...

The only file in /etc/cron.d/ is sysstat (from sysstat-5.0.5-5.rhel3):
$ ls -l /etc/cron.d/sysstat
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root          188 Dec 21  2004 /etc/cron.d/sysstat

in which it executes /usr/lib/sa/sa1 every 10 minutes, and not from
/etc/cron.hourly as I mistakenly assumed it was. But the messages:

Mar 20 16:50:01 lnxsys1 crond[24390]: Permission denied
Mar 20 17:01:01 lnxsys1 crond[25082]: Permission denied

which are not the "BAD FILE MODE" as in the code.
And I don't see anything indication that run-parts is executed.

I'm still looking,
ray