Edit crontab with an editor other than the default
34,098
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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Author by
D. Clancy
Updated on September 18, 2022Comments
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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?
-
martinho about 4 yearspossible duplicate of askubuntu.com/questions/55022/changing-default-crontab-editor
-
-
Sridhar Sarnobat over 6 yearsI 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.