I am having problems with a sparc5 solaris 7 box, when i try to edit cron, (crontab -e as root), it says
$ crontab -e
0





and then nothing, if i enter anything it errors out but does accept q for quit. But doesn't bring up my editor of the cron file. How can I troubleshoot this?


Thanks

To troubleshoot you should read the man page for crontab.

Note: You would not have a $ as a prompt if you were root. Make sure you have done a su - .

Then check your EDITOR:

The EDITOR value can be seen by
$ echo "$EDITOR"

If it's not set, you will get an error "Undefined variable". If you then do the crontab -e command, it will default to ed which is mentioned in the man page for crontab.

Fix these two problems and you will be on your way.

sh or ksh:
# EDITOR=vi; export EDITOR

EXCELLENT, thank you both! works, it's a new system, I haven't got it all set up correctly, thank you.