UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I want to add one line to the end of my crontab using a script.
I have tried piping in the editor commands, but I can't get it to work.

crontab -e user << EX
$a
This is the text I want to add.
.
wq
EX

This doesn't work. Is there an easier way to do this?

It is not necessary to use crontab -e to edit crontabs. You can directly do this:

echo "<entire_line_that_is_required_including_the_timings_and_commands>" >> /var/spool/cron/<crontab_file>

You will have to give the cron daemon a HUP signal after this. So if you are not someone who has root access, you will have to find someone that does.

I do not see anything in the HP-UX nor SunOS cron man page to suggest that cron responds to SIGHUP. Looking at Sun's source code for cron (Thanks, Sun!! ), I see only:
(void) signal(SIGHUP, SIG_IGN);
You typically need to restart cron after doing something like this.

I have to say that I recommend the use of the crontab command, even for root. And it's easy enough:

crontab -l > oldcrontab
cp oldcrontab newcrontab
echo "$newline" >> newcrontab
crontab < newcrontab