UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

You do not need to become root to edit your own crontab file.

Create a new crontab file, or edit an existing file.

# crontab -e [username]

where username specifies the name of the user's account for which you want to create or edit a crontab file. You can create your own crontab file without superuser privileges, but you must have superuser privileges to creating or edit a crontab file for root or another user.

Originally Posted by Rossdba

Hi,

[HTML]
bash-3.2$ crontab -l
crontab: can't open your crontab file.
bash-3.2$ EDITOR=vi
bash-3.2$ export EDITOR
bash-3.2$ crontab -e
crontab: can't open your crontab file.

To verify if a specific user can access the crontab command, use the crontab -l command while you are logged into the user account.

$ crontab -l

If the user can access the crontab command, and already has created a crontab file, the file is displayed. Otherwise, if the user can access the crontab command but no crontab file exists, a message similar to the following message is displayed:

crontab: can't open your crontab file

Either this user either is listed in the cron.allow file (if the file exists), or the user is not listed in the cron.deny file.