crontab: no changes made to crontab

crontab: no changes made to crontab

[Michael Chen]

Dear all, since the first time using "crontab -", I can never change the
crontab file anymore. "crontab -e" calls emacs, but cron just discarded any
new modifications. The emacs saved the "crontab.*****" into /tmp. What's
wrong? Thanks.


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Re: crontab: no changes made to crontab

[Thorsten Kampe]

* Michael Chen (2004-03-02 06:57 +0100)
> Dear all, since the first time using "crontab -", I can never change the
> crontab file anymore. "crontab -e" calls emacs, but cron just discarded any
> new modifications. The emacs saved the "crontab.*****" into /tmp. What's
> wrong? Thanks.

Try using another editor as Emacs is a GUI editor.


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Re: crontab: no changes made to crontab

[Igor Pechtchanski]

On Tue, 2 Mar 2004, Thorsten Kampe wrote:

> * Michael Chen (2004-03-02 06:57 +0100)
> > Dear all, since the first time using "crontab -", I can never change the
> > crontab file anymore. "crontab -e" calls emacs, but cron just discarded any
> > new modifications. The emacs saved the "crontab.*****" into /tmp. What's
> > wrong? Thanks.
>
> Try using another editor as Emacs is a GUI editor.

This has nothing to do with emacs being a GUI editor (which it isn't, BTW,
or not necessarily).  This does have to do with the editor writing files
in-place.  I'm not sure if either the native or the Cygwin port of emacs
does.  That said, Thorsten did provide a good rule of thumb: most GUI
editors, especially Windows ones, don't write files in place.
	Igor
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Re: crontab: no changes made to crontab

[Jeff Mincy]

> On Tue, 2 Mar 2004, Thorsten Kampe wrote:
>> * Michael Chen (2004-03-02 06:57 +0100)
>> > Dear all, since the first time using "crontab -", I can never change the
>> > crontab file anymore. "crontab -e" calls emacs, but cron just discarded any
>> > new modifications. The emacs saved the "crontab.*****" into /tmp. What's
>> > wrong? Thanks.
>>
>> Try using another editor as Emacs is a GUI editor.
> 
> This has nothing to do with emacs being a GUI editor (which it isn't, BTW,
> or not necessarily).  This does have to do with the editor writing files
> in-place.  I'm not sure if either the native or the Cygwin port of emacs
> does.  That said, Thorsten did provide a good rule of thumb: most GUI
> editors, especially Windows ones, don't write files in place.

Probably OT, but Emacs has several different ways to save files.
This is for XEmacs, (as far as I remember) Emacs works the same way.

See `file-precious-flag'
  This feature works by writing the new contents into a temporary file
  and then renaming the temporary file to replace the original.
  In this way, any I/O error in writing leaves the original untouched,
  and there is never any instant where the file is nonexistent.

crontab -e expects the changes to be made in place, so try
 (setq file-precious-flag nil)

If it works you could add this line as the first line of the crontab.
## -*- file-precious-flag: nil -*-

-jeff


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