I have two unrelated questions:

1) I have EDITOR and VISUAL set in my own and root's ~/.profile to emacs. This does not allow me to change crontab, either in X or at the console. I need to "export EDITOR=vim" in order to change cron settings. Why is this?

2) One of the examples in the crontab(1) man page is as follows:

Does this sample cron entry not cause the date command to run on the first and fifth day of the month (as long as those days fall in the range Mon-Wed), instead of the first and fifth Monday of the month? I'm not long awake so perhaps I'm missing the obvious!

1) If EDITOR is not exported, then it won't be in the environment of the "crontab -e" process. The X environment inheritance is a little hit&miss and will amongst other things depend on how its started. I've added an /etc/xprofile to my system to make things a little more reliable.

2) From just above the examples in the man-page:
Seems counter intuitive to me (I would have expected it to do the same as what you were expecting), but that seems to suggest that its the latter.

Perhaps I have this wrong, but print $EDITOR does return /usr/bin/emacs.

From ~/.profile:

I was so engrossed in the examples I completely missed that! Thanks.

Since 'crontab' is SUID, I'm guessing it starts a new process (that execs emacs) and thus requires that you 'export EDITOR'.

EDIT: Oops! I failed to read your post properly (it must be all that cough syrup I drank earlier). Well, I tried 'export EDITOR' on my machine and it worked fine.

Did you try to change a setting? I should have mentioned that it opens fine in emacs and I can seemingly make changes and write those changes to disk but when I reopen the crontab it has reverted to the default settings.

Nope...

The 1 is a "well unknown" feature... I stuck on this many times as a emacs user...

Same for SUDO I think...

I go through nano (sorry I don't know enough VI to be vim at ease)

Problem is the cron edition use a "jailed" version of the file, which have a "static" uid (inode?) anyway, when you save with emacs this effectivelly "duplicate" the file and replace it... So the "hard linked" link to the edited file remains untouched... And when you leave the "cron edition process" doesn't see a change so your changes are simply lost...

Use an editor that saves files 'inplace' (the real physical file) not juggling with copies, renaming, backups...

I don't know if we can force emacs to act like this. But nano does (vim does too ).

So:
Should do too.

OR... like you did:
So in short: it's an emacs behavior... Not a problem with environment variable or anything.

Cheers.

Great explanation. Thanks for that. It works fine in NetBSD by the way. In Slackware I can just about get by with vim for occasional crontab editing if I have to!

Well, if I "see well" the problem, I didn't dig into the code to see why and if we can blame anybody, I don't care, once I understood, the workaround was faster that trying to fix it.

I'd suspect that was somehow the emacs way of doing things, but it can be coupled with which kind of file system do the job and how the 'driver' handles it... Also one who can be "blamed" is the 'crontab -e' (or sudoers editor) which keep a hard link to the file during the "external edition process" instead of reloading it from name after edition is done, which, I think would have been more "robust", and simpler for everybody...

Cheers

Garry.

PS/ Haha I always "C-x C-s" before submitting those messages...

Computers are pretty fast these days, but you probably would be happier using emacsclient for such things. See the emacs manual for more info.

Yep I do use it in certain situations. Thanks.