On Debian-based systems, files in /etc/cron.d:
– must be owned by root
– must not be group or world writable
– may be symlinked, but the destination must follow the ownership and file permissions above
– Filenames must contain ONLY letters, numbers, underscores and hyphens. (not periods)
– must contain a username in the 6th column
From the man page:
Files in this directory have to be owned by root, do not need to be executable (they are configuration files, just like /etc/crontab) and must conform to the same naming convention as used by run-parts(8): they must consist solely of upper- and lower-case letters, digits, underscores, and hyphens. This means that they cannot contain any dots.
The man page also provides this explanation to this strange rule:
For example, any file containing dots will be ignored. This is done to prevent cron from running any of the files that are left by the Debian package management
system when handling files in /etc/cron.d/ as configuration files (i.e. files ending in .dpkg-dist, .dpkg-orig, and .dpkg-new).