how to use crontab and cron.daily

[nigel henry]

On Saturday 08 July 2006 21:35, Todd Zullinger wrote:
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> nigel henry wrote:
> > Next su'ed to root, and with Gedit, went to /var/spool/cron/$USER,
> > and changed the time for this crontab to be run, like 2 mins later
> > to test it, and ignoring the "DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE".
>
> Why would you do that instead of just running crontab -e as your
> regular user?  If you do edit the file directly as root, just be sure
> that your editor won't mangle the permissions on you.  Then you'd have
> trouble editing them using crontab sometime later.

Sorry. I wrongly presumed that crontab -e would set up a new crontab. The -e 
(edit) should have made me aware that it would only access an already created 
crontab using my user name. I won't make that error again.
>
> > One last ? Which file did I edit when I ran export EDITOR=nano. I've
> > looked around the filesystem but can't find it.
>
> You weren't editing any file with that command.  What that did is
> modified your shell environment.  If you want to ensure that nano is
> always your editor, open up ~/.bash_profile and add a line to export
> EDITOR=nano.

Ok. Just ran crontab -e, and again have got my newly created crontab, but 
using vi, so presumably export EDITOR=nano was a one shot thing. I have the 
vi cheat sheet, but I think you have to be using it all the time to get 
really used to working with it, and probably the same goes for emacs. I don't 
use text mode text editors much, and nano is for me the easier to use. I'll 
edit ~/bash_profile and set nano as the editor to be used.

Thanks for the advice. Nigel.
>
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