Edit crontab with an editor other than the default

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Solution 1

crontab should respect the EDITOR environment variable, so you can just do (for the root crontab for example)

sudo EDITOR=vi crontab -e

From man crontab

The -e option is used to edit the  current  crontab  using  the  editor
specified  by  the  VISUAL  or EDITOR environment variables.  

Solution 2

Specifying nano as the editor for crontab file

export VISUAL=nano

Specifying vim as the editor for crontab file

export VISUAL=vim
  • now, just try it: crontab -e
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D. Clancy
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D. Clancy

Updated on September 18, 2022

Comments

  • D. Clancy
    D. Clancy over 1 year

    I would like to edit crontab with vi once. My default editor is nano, and I want to keep it that way. I only want to edit with vi one time. I don't want to change the default to vi then back to nano after editing. Can this be done?

  • Sridhar Sarnobat
    Sridhar Sarnobat over 6 years
    I don't think you want sudo here unless you want to edit really fundamental tasks. Most people run cron jobs at user-level. Also, on Mac OS X if you use sudo it gives an error. Without it it works fine.