1

While creating crontab by using crontab -e, I am unable to edit. It shows:

# Edit this file to introduce tasks to be run by cron.
# 
# Each task to run has to be defined through a single line
# indicating with different fields when the task will be run
# and what command to run for the task
# 
# To define the time you can provide concrete values for
# minute (m), hour (h), day of month (dom), month (mon),
# and day of week (dow) or use '*' in these fields (for 'any').# 
# Notice that tasks will be started based on the cron's system
# daemon's notion of time and timezones.
# 
# Output of the crontab jobs (including errors) is sent through
# email to the user the crontab file belongs to (unless redirected).
# 
# For example, you can run a backup of all your user accounts
# at 5 a.m every week with:
# 0 5 * * 1 tar -zcf /var/backups/home.tgz /home/
# 
# For more information see the manual pages of crontab(5) and cron(8)
# 
# m h  dom mon dow   command
Raulinbonn
  • 98
Kanthu Chowdary
  • 13

2 Answers2

2

The display is correct, that is the file to edit. Maybe your default editor is vi or vim, then you would need to know how to edit with those.

To learn how to edit with vi or vim: vimtutor

To change your default editor, see: Changing default crontab editor

Raulinbonn
  • 98
0

Set system wide default editor:

$ sudo update-alternatives --config editor

You could also set the environment variable $EDITOR to ~/.profile file:

export EDITOR=nano