This may be a dumb question, but hey, I'm a newbie.

I'm trying to setup a nightly task through cron. Several posts I have read in these forums say you should simply type crontab -e to edit your cron table.

So, I open a command prompt, type crontab -e and I'm setting on a blank screen (no previous cron statements). I type my desired command. The question is, how do I "save my work" from this command line? Isn't my command supposed to be saved to a text file somewhere?

If I later go back to a command prompt and type crontab -l to list my table, I'm told that no crontab exists?

What am I doing wrong? RedHat 9.0 is my platform if that helps.

Is it completely blank or are there tildes down the side? Crontab -e should invoke the default editor (it particularly likes $VISUAL) and that should be vi. So edit and do a ':wq'.

geez. that was easy. i was setting at the vi editor and didn't even know it. now when i type crontab -l my script is listed. thanks.