UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I am familiar with cron, and vi, but i need to make a change to my
/etc/hosts file, and would like to schedule it. Not sure how to run vi inside of cron.

If you wish to make changes to the /etc/hosts file at specific times, then write a shell script / program to do that and invoke that script / program using cron.

Editing the file using vi would require manual intervention and manual intervention won't be present when a cron job is run. One of the purposes of making cron jobs is to eliminate manual intervention.

what kind of changes? maybe you need to use "sed" to get what you want.

I have just a simple change, we're doing some readdressing and one address will be changing. Unfortunately, I'm not very familiar with sed, so i would probably need some guidance, if possible.

Does that address change occur frequently? And at some regular intervals of time? If yes, then you may have to set up a cron job. If this change is going to happen only once, then you need not use cron. Check out at command instead.