On Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 10:11 PM, keith smith <klsmith2020@yahoo.com> wrote:

Hi,

I have been setting up a cron job and found out there are two different crons. 1) the user cron located at /var/spool/cron/ on my Fedora Box and 2) the system crontab located at /etc/crontab .

When I do the crontab -e (if I am recalling correctly) I am editing the user crontab.

To edit the system crontab do I just use VI or some other editor?

I would have thought if I were root and issued crontab -e I would have been editing the system crontab, however this was not my experience.

Thanks in advance for your insight.

------------------------
Keith Smith

Crontab can be configured in /etc/crontab with joe, vim, emacs or pico.

You can setup your default editor in bash as well to trivially use the /var/spool/cron/root file:

add to .bashrc

#!/bin/bash
# F. Bar 
# SomeCompany or dot.com

# $HOME/.bashrc 
# Add various additional things that don't go into /etc/profile

# Date which can be trivially used for file copy or other tasks
# example: copy file.ext file.ext.$today

today=date +"%m-%d-%Y"


# Setup my default editor for crontab and other things (visudo)

export EDITOR=nano
export VISUAL=nano

#  Create a bash alias for crontab to use nano

alias crontab='env EDITOR=nano crontab -e'


# System management aliasesssssss
alias log='tail -n 200 /var/log/messages |less'
alias mailmelog='tail -n 500 /var/log/messages |mail -s "Message Log" foobar@somecompany.com


# end custom .bashrc

Or from the command line:

sudo env EDITOR=nano crontab -e