Guest100,
I used to use only "crontab -e" until I found this way of editing the crontab. It is much safer for you and if you make any mistakes it doesn't corrupt your crontab file.
When you look at the options for the manpage for crontab, the first options is "crontab filename".
My only point about saving the crontab out to a file and editing it is 1) so that you will have a copy of it and 2) when you edit this text file that you just saved out, you can execute "crontab filename" to replace the current crontab with the newly edited one. In addition, it prevents you from making a mistake typing while using "crontab -e".
Step 1
Copy out the crontab to a saved file.
$ crontab -l > somefile
Step 2
edit somefile and make changes.
$ vi somefile
Step 3
copy the newly edited file back into place.
$ crontab somefile
This is the safest way to edit the crontab file so that it doesn't get corrupted.
I work for a very large telecom company and this is the company standard for all platforms: SUN, HPUX, and AIX with several different versions on each platform.
In addition, yes you can go to /usr/spool/cron/crontabs and vi the file in question, edit it and save. The file will be recognized by cron because I have done this as well. I have even cut and pasted from a Word document into a telnet session while vi'ing a file in /usr/spool/cron/crontabs file. And there was no corruption of the file when I saved it and ran cron.
Trust me, all of these things work! Can someone else back me up on this? I am not trying to mess you up, only to help you out.