UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I found a nice page that explains crontab but I was wondering can the cron table be edited in a way other than with crontab -e? In other words, directly in some editor.

Absolutely!!!

Type: crontab -l > mycronfile.txt
The -l (lower case L) option for LIST. Default is to stdout as usual. Edit mycronfile.txt, it's just an ordinary text file. To reload the edited file, type: "crontab mycronfile.txt" (without the quotes of course). If you've introduced a syntax error in your editing, crontab will warn you and will NOT load the edited file -- that is crontab will remain what it was when you first typed crontab -l.

After your edits, you can also check your work with crontab -l. If your changes are there, then you've been successful in editing and loading.

Thanks. That really helped.

As an aside, I'm finding the online documentation difficult at times. What you stated so clearly was much harder to see in man crontab though it was there: