Hi. I hope someone can help me with this problem.
Being a novice to Unix, I editted my crontab directly
by typing " crontab -e ". Well, I needed to make some
changes so, I typed " crontab -r ". Now I have no crontab,
and I can't seem to get crontab to write a new file.

I' ve tried:

vi somefile
crontab somefile

I get the following errors:

crontab:
crontab: error on previous line; unexpected character found in line.

What might be my options from here. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Try this:

Hi,

Please look at : /var/spool/cron/crontabs

Maybe you have a copy over here, else this file can be restored(root for root, oracle for oracle, etc)

>/var/spool/cron/crontabs/root
Will empty the crontab file !!! and makes you able to retry it all using "crontab -e"

Regs David

Thanks for your suggestions. I have corrected the problem
by recreating a root crontab file and placing it in the /usr/spool/crontabs directory.

Now when I type "crontab -l" I see the new crontab file I created; however, when I try to overwrite my exisiting crontab file with the command "crontab somefile."

I still get the following error:

crontab: error on previous line; unexpected character found in line

Also, when I try editting the file with the crontab -e command I can't save the file without the creating multiple text lines after pressing the escape key. I am using the vi editor.

Hi,

When doing a "cat <filename> | od -c"
You will get to see the octal and asci output of the file, you should now be able to find out what character is accidently put in the file.

Regs David