Solaris

Hi guys,

I edited my crontab file and entered this enter:
* * * * * w >> `date +%F`.who

Then I later deleted the above entry and entered :
* * * * * w >> /rpool/who/w.txt

when I login and ran : crontab -e

I get this entry:
* * * * * w >> `date +%F`.who

Instead of this entry:

* * * * * w >> /rpool/who/w.txt

i will be glad if someone can help me fix this problem.

Thank you

Simple answer: never directly edit the crontab, use

Code:

crontab -e

only
Some people use vi, and it works with some versions of crond. Not all.

Thanks Jim,

I do use

Code:

crontab -e

to edit the crontab file. But I set the default editor to vi before editing. Can that be causing the problem?

Thanks

Yes, Jim is right, don't directly edit crontab files, use the tools depending on what Unix/Linux flavour you have.

The generic explanation for what you experienced is this.

When Unix boots and cron services start the crontabs are read into memory and the last modified date/time of each crontab is also loaded into memory. Periodically, the cron service wakes up and goes to see if any crontabs on disk have been modified since boot time. If it finds a modified crontab, then it loads it into memory overwriting the old one.

Therefore, you can see that until this periodic check runs (and it varies according to Unix version), your modifications won't be seen.

However, if you use the proper tools then cron knows about it straight away.

Alternatively, if you modify crontabs directly, stop, then start the cron service from the command line (see man pages for this according to your Unix version).

Hope that helps.