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Full Discussion: Editing a CRON file
Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers Editing a CRON file Post 21702 by Kelam_Magnus on Tuesday 21st of May 2002 04:11:19 PM
Old 05-21-2002
Save a copy of the crontab for root

I would say that directly editing the crontab file is dangerous!

Holistic is close to my suggestion. You can do the following commands. I keep a copy of my root crontab for safe keeping.

crontab -l > tempcron # saves crontab to a file
vi tempcron # edit crontab file safely!!
crontab tempcron reapply changes to crontab with config file.


This is a foolproof way to modify the crontab. Sometimes if you get control chars in the crontab it may corrupt it.

Always use vi and edit using another file.

Smilie
 

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bcrontab(1)						      General Commands Manual						       bcrontab(1)

NAME
bcrontab - Manage users crontab files SYNOPSIS
bcrontab [ -u user ] file bcrontab [ -u user ] { -l | -r | -e } DESCRIPTION
bcrontab interfaces with the bcron-spool daemon to manage crontab files in the privileged spool directory. OPTIONS
-u user Tell bcron-spool that we are acting on behalf of the named user. bcron-spool will only accept the username if bcrontab is running as either root or the same user ID as the named user. -l List the cronab crontab to standard output. -r Remove the user's crontab. -e Edit the current crontab. ENVIRONMENT
VISUAL If this is set, it is used as the editor to invoke to edit a crontab. EDITOR If $VISUAL is not set and this is, it is used as the editor to invoke to edit a crontab. If neither are set, /bin/vi is used. BCRON_SOCKET The path to the named socket used to communicate with bcron-spool. Defaults to /var/run/bcron-spool. LOGNAME USER These two variables are used, in order, to determine the user name invoking the program. One must be set if the -u option is not used. FILES
bcrontab tries to writes a temporary file into the current directory, and then into /tmp if that fails, in order to edit the current crontab. SEE ALSO
bcron-spool(8), crontab(5) AUTHOR
Bruce Guenter <bruceg@em.ca> bcrontab(1)
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