UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I saw a post on here a while back describing how to edit a crontab file when I'm not able to edit it via crontab -e.

Currently, if I try to do a crontab -e, it just comes back with:

# crontab -e
7987


<and then it just hangs there FOREVER>

If I do a crontab -l, it shows me all of the cronjobs as expected.

How can I edit the crontab?

Thanks!

You are editing crontab but you are using the ed editor. Type a "q" to get out of that. You need to have an environment variable to change to another editor. Which editor is your choice. The syntax varies from shell to shell. Try something like:
EDITOR=/usr/bin/vi
export EDITOR
and you really want to put it in your startup file for your shell so it will be set each time you login.