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Full Discussion: Edit Crontab
Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers Edit Crontab Post 302091032 by safraser on Thursday 28th of September 2006 02:19:07 PM
Old 09-28-2006
Juliet,

I'm not a unix guru, either, and I was mystifed by the crontab business at first.

I don't know what your OS is... Mine is Solaris. When I first launched crontab -l or -e, my screen was not blank but it did just hang there without doing anything. This was because I had not specified any type of editor for my environment variables. Don't know if this might be your problem?

First, I execute:
export EDITOR=vi

Then, I execute:
crontab -e

This brings up a vi editor into which the cron jobs are set up. If you are really really new to unix, you might not be familiar with vi, which is a unix text editor. Find a cheat sheet for vi, before you use it the first time.

Like everyone has said, do NOT edit the crontab file directly. Only do it with the crontab -e command.

Hope this helps,
Shirley
 

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CRON(8) 						      System Manager's Manual							   CRON(8)

NAME
cron - clock daemon SYNOPSIS
/usr/sbin/cron DESCRIPTION
Cron executes commands at specified dates and times according to the instructions in the files /etc/crontab and /etc/crontab.local. None, either one, or both of these files may be present. Since cron never exits, it should only be executed once. This is best done by running cron from the initialization process through the file /etc/rc; see init(8). The crontab files consist of lines of seven fields each. The fields are separated by spaces or tabs. The first five are integer patterns to specify: o minute (0-59) o hour (0-23) o day of the month (1-31) o month of the year (1-12) o day of the week (1-7 with 1 = Monday) Each of these patterns may contain: o a number in the range above o two numbers separated by a minus meaning a range inclusive o a list of numbers separated by commas meaning any of the numbers o an asterisk meaning all legal values The sixth field is a user name: the command will be run with that user's uid and permissions. The seventh field consists of all the text on a line following the sixth field, including spaces and tabs; this text is treated as a command which is executed by the Shell at the specified times. A percent character (``%'') in this field is translated to a new-line character. Both crontab files are checked by cron every minute, on the minute. FILES
/etc/crontab /etc/crontab.local 7th Edition October 23, 1996 CRON(8)
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