Why Does Crontab -e Command Open In GUI Text Editor?

My employer purchased a desktop PC with a custom Linux installation, CentOS 6.9. The vendor is not providing any support. On this desktop I am trying to automate a simple script I created using crontab, strangely, whenever I run the command 'crontab -e' it opens in a GUI text editor.

I enter the cron job I need, click the save button on the text editor and close it, however, when I run 'crontab -l' and view the listing I don't see the cron I entered in the text editor.

I'm a newbie so everything I'm doing is informed by Google search so I expected crontab to open in vim. Could someone explain: Why is it opening in a GUI text editor? How do I get it to save?

Thank you

Welcome to LinuxQuestions.

While the default editor is vim it can be changed but we need to know what editor is actually running.

Well, crontab -e first tries $VISUAL, then $EDITOR, and then, if both of them unset, starts /usr/bin/vi. So that GUI editor must be set either in VISUAL or in EDITOR.

Originally Posted by rakeshmanmohan My employer purchased a desktop PC with a custom Linux installation, CentOS 6.9. The vendor is not providing any support. On this desktop I am trying to automate a simple script I created using crontab, strangely, whenever I run the command 'crontab -e' it opens in a GUI text editor. I enter the cron job I need, click the save button on the text editor and close it, however, when I run 'crontab -l' and view the listing I don't see the cron I entered in the text editor. I'm a newbie so everything I'm doing is informed by Google search so I expected crontab to open in vim. Could someone explain: Why is it opening in a GUI text editor? How do I get it to save?

You don't say which GUI text editor is opening, so we can't tell you how to save it when you're done. However, you can look in your .profile or .bashrc files for the $EDITOR and $VISUAL environment variables. If they're not set there, look in /etc/profile, and change it to be whatever you'd like. I *THINK* (don't remember exactly) that if you remove those variables, it will default to vi, but I'm not 100% sure of that.

Besides all that, though, I'm not surprised your vendor isn't providing help...CentOS 6.9 is VERY old:
https://wiki.centos.org/About/Product

If these are new PC's, I'd sure want to know why they provided such an old OS that's going to be TOTALLY out of support (as in, ZERO updates/fixes) as of this year.