Were you logged in as "root" or as a normal user?

If this is an operational system you will be advised to get your Systems Administrator to repair the problem.



Assuming this is a training course on an expendable test system we can continue.

If you were logged in as root you have attempted to replace your root crontab with a file called "a.cron". This failed.
However I would have expected the error message:
"crontab: error on previous line; unexpected character found in line."
Even with your error message I doubt if it changed the crontab.

The script called "a.cron" contains errors. As a minimum in unix all backslash (\) characters should be solidus characters (/) in pathnames. If you have not tested the script you should not put it into a cron.


After repairing the script. You probably just need to run "crontab -e" again and change each backslash (\) to solidus (/). This is because unix syntax for a path is different from Microsoft syntax for a path.