.pgpass

I'm running Debian unstable, and I keep getting a message from a
cron job that wants to do.maintenance about no password being
supplied.
 Password:
 psql: fe_sendauth: no password supplied

Now, I gather in the past a person had to explicitly put a
password in the cron job, but we are now supposed to use a file
called ~/.pgpass (~ being /var/lib/postgres).  Well, I do have
such a file, so I am confused as to why I keep getting this error
message from the cron job.  Five colon separated fields
 host:port:*:user:password
are in this file.  Host is localhost, port is 5432, ....  I must
be missing something simple, but I don't see it.

Gord