On 2016-08-19 13:11, Oliver Kurz wrote:
On Friday 19 August 2016 11:27:03 Bob Williams wrote:
To edit my own crontab, I type crontab -e, which opens my crontab in vim (default editor here). The file contains numerous lines like this
# DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE - edit the master and reinstall. # (- installed on Sun Aug 14 14:29:06 2016) # (Cronie version 4.2)
but when write and close the file (:wq), I get this
10:11 bob@hexagon:~> crontab -e crontab: installing new crontab
which is what I expect and not alarming. Why all the repeated warnings in the file itself?
If I do cat /var/spool/cron/tabs/<my_username>
I see these warnings. If I call "crontab -l", I see them, too. If I call "crontab -e" I don't so everything is as expected. Maybe by mistake you somehow listed the file and wrote the full content with "crontab -e"? Then maybe it even shows you these warnings twice?
The warning is not "displayed", but are comments in the crontab file. Apparently using crontab -e they are removed from view. Somehow the process has to detect those comments to remove them; thus if they were altered at some time, they are probably not recognized and displayed. The warning refers to not edit directly "/var/spool/cron/tabs/<my_username>", but use crontab -e instead. -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 13.1 x86_64 "Bottle" at Telcontar)