[olug] crontab -e problems

[Nick Walter]

Thing to check:

Look for an environment variable named VISUAL,  some programs use that to
find which editor to use.  A conflicting EDITOR vs VISUAL setting can have
some odd effects.

Check permissions on your /tmp directory and your crontab files.   If memory
serves, /tmp should have drwxrwxrwt permissions and be owned by root user
and group.  The crontab file itself shouuld be -rw-------

Nick Walter


----- Original Message -----
From: "William E. Kempf" <wekempf at cox.net>
To: <olug at olug.org>
Sent: Friday, May 23, 2003 12:21 PM
Subject: Re: [olug] crontab -e problems


>
> Brian Roberson said:
> > crontab -l > somefile ; emacs somefile ; crontab somefile
>
> Yes, I know about this work around, but I honestly don't care for it.  You
> missed the command to remove somefile, which puts this work around at four
> commands, which is a bit much.  Picky, I know.  Maybe I could wrap this in
> a shell script and use diff to decide if I need to add it to crontab.
>
> But I'd still like to understand what's wrong here.
>
> > or
> >
> > export EDITOR=vi ; crontab -e ; export EDITOR=emacs
>
> The interesting thing about this is that, for some reason I can't begin to
> explain, emacs is still used by crontab -e.  More confusing, is that the
> problem with crontab not recognizing changes appears to be happening only
> with some user accounts.  My own user id and root both exhibit the
> erroneous behavior every time, but I did an su to an account name set up
> for a service and was able to create and modify it's crontab numerous
> times with crontab -e.
>
> This concerns me, and I really want to know why it's happening.  I fear a
> bug in some part of my system.
>
> --
> William E. Kempf
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> OLUG mailing list
> OLUG at olug.org
> http://lists.olug.org/mailman/listinfo/olug
>