I think crontab -e is the user crontab.  In other words it will edit the current user's crontab.  I think I have just used vi to edit they system crontab.

On 2015-09-21 19:04, Michael Havens wrote:

I thought that was a good idea!

bmike1@c521 ~ $ sudo crontab -u bmike1 -l
no crontab for bmike1
bmike1@c521 ~ $ sudo crontab -u root -l
no crontab for root
bmike1@c521 ~ $

But not in my case. Unless of course there is another user it is run
under.
So the mouse wheel in my mind started to creak..... So I inspected the
man for crontab.... which inspired  me to cat /etc/cron*....
which lead me down the path to ls /etc/cron.daily/
and in that directory is a file! /etc/cron.daily/apt/

So How to edit the file? Ask PLUG or ask the web? I opted to ask the
web. It told me: edit crontab with crontab -e
So I tried:
bmike1@c521 /etc/cron.daily $ crontab -e /etc/cron.daily/apt

bmike1@c521 /etc/cron.daily $ crontab /etc/cron.daily/apt -e

bmike1@c521 /etc/cron.daily $ sudo crontab /etc/cron.daily/apt -e

and

bmike1@c521 /etc/cron.daily $ sudo crontab -u bmike1
/etc/cron.daily/apt/ -e

all of which responded with:
crontab: usage error: no arguments permitted after this option
usage: crontab [-u user] file
 crontab [ -u user ] [ -i ] { -e | -l | -r }
 (default operation is replace, per 1003.2)
 -e (edit user's crontab)
 -l (list user's crontab)
 -r (delete user's crontab)
 -i (prompt before deleting user's crontab)
bmike1@c521 /etc/cron.daily $
so I looked a little more in the web and so tried:

sudo CRONTAB -E bmike1

which gave the same error.
So now I need to ask what I'm doing wrong.

On Mon, Sep 21, 2015 at 9:19 PM, Michael Butash <michael@butash.net>
wrote:

I've noticed on lower-end systems, that daily cron will peg a system
for a bit while that occurs. I had an ancient imac with ubuntu
installed that the apt update would hang the system for like a
half-hour with an old 400mhz ppc proc, consuming all cpu and memory,
then swap and thus disks too. I finally just disabled it, and
shortly thereafter retired the outdated system itself that it
obviously had outlived its usefulness vs. power drawn.

You likely have the same issue, just when using it, the update will
slam the system. Might be better off doing it manually, or setting
the update time for the cronjob to overnight when not using it.

-mb

On 09/19/2015 09:25 AM, Michael Havens wrote:

the problem seems to have been checkapt.py . I tried to figure out
what it does and it seems that it locks a database (apt's?). But
it couldn't of been apt's as I wasn't running apt. Then I ran top
again and it seemed to have corrected itself after 10 or fifteen
minutes. Am I correct in what I think it does? Is it safe to kill
if this happens again?

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