Cron job still running after deletion from cron.hourly

Question

I installed yum-cron on my CentOS 7 VM, but decided I did not need it to run hourly. So I tried to rename, and later completely remove, /etc/cron.hourly/0yum-hourly and /etc/yum/yum-cron-hourly.conf. However, for weeks now I've been getting the following emails hourly:

/etc/cron.hourly/0yum-hourly.cron.old:

Error reading config file: /etc/yum/yum-cron-hourly.conf

Except I have guaranteed that the file /etc/cron.hourly/0yum-hourly.cron.old no longer exists, in any form or by any name; the file has been deleted. I have restarted the crond and yum-cron services, yet the problem persists. Why (or perhaps more importantly, how) does cron keep insisting on running a job that no longer exists?

Answer 1

You did not delete 0yum-hourly.cron; you renamed it to an .old file that is still being executed.

Any scripts under /etc/cron.hourly will be executed hourly, so you have to remove the file or move it to a backup directory for cron to stop executing it.

Answer 2

You said that you deleted (or in the case of the latter, possibly renamed) the files:

0yum-hourly.cron.old 
yum-cron-hourly.conf

Your error message says:

/etc/cron.hourly/0yum-hourly.cron.old:
Error reading config file: /etc/yum/yum-cron-hourly.conf

From what I can surmise, the yum-cron service is still running but the conf file either doesn't exist or is named something else.

You will either need to stop the service or restore /etc/yum/yum-cron-hourly.conf. If you don't need yum-cron anymore then you can just uninstall it after stopping the service.