Crontab changes not permanent

Nylex · 07-19-2007, 12:34 AM

I'm having a weird problem with Slack 12.0 and dcron. It uses the VISUAL environment variable, which I've set to /usr/bin/emacs and I can do a "crontab -e" and edit the file fine. However, after saving the changes, exiting Emacs and then doing a "crontab -l" it seems the crontab has reverted to the old version :/. What's weird is that editing my user's crontab worked fine, but this problem happens when I'm editing root's crontab.

Any ideas? Thanks!

Tinkster · 07-19-2007, 01:42 PM

My only suggestion would be to run that under strace
and see what it's trying to do when writing the the
file back and exiting.

And what does it do if you if you set VISUAL to vim?

Cheers,
Tink

Nylex · 07-19-2007, 02:14 PM

It works fine if I use vi (I just unset VISUAL). I don't know if it's something to do with Slack 12.0, because setting VISUAL in the same way under 11.0 never caused problems for me. I will run strace when I have some more free time and see what happens. Never used strace before, so I'll have to learn!

Thanks Tink!

AlucardZero · 07-19-2007, 02:42 PM

Code:

crontab -e -u root

?

Tinkster · 07-19-2007, 07:08 PM

man crontab

Cheers,
Tink