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

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).

Solution 1:

You should be able to chmod -x scriptname to disable a script but leave the file in place.

Solution 2:

run-parts does not execute jobs which have a dot in their name, so

mv /etc/cron.d/job /etc/cron.d/job.disabled

will do the trick.

Solution 3:

Usually cron.daily is invoked via /etc/crontab through a line like e.g.

run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily

man run-parts gives you the options.

run-parts --test /etc/cron.daily shows which jobs are executed without running them.

I prefer to make a subdir 'Disabled' and move my jobs there.

In any case if you update a package it is likely that the job gets into place again or that removed 'x' bits get restored