Find packages including cronjob or other automated scripts

Question

Debian auditing package prioritization guidelines recommend to check the packages containing

Anything which contains a cronjob or other automated script which runs with root privileges.

How can I find the packages which meet the aforementioned rule?

Answer 1

For cronjobs, packages have cronjobs listed in their files:

$ dpkg-query -L mdadm | grep cron
/etc/cron.daily
/etc/cron.daily/mdadm
/etc/cron.d
/etc/cron.d/mdadm

So you could do:

ALL_PKGS=$(dpkg -l | awk '{ print $2 }' | tail -n +6)
for PKG in $ALL_PKGS; do
    if dpkg-query -L $PKG | grep -q /etc/cron; then
        echo $PKG
    fi
done

Note that this tail -n +6 is because of the extra output from dpkg -l , you might have to do a slightly different adjustment to get all packages.