I would like to edit crontab with vi once. My default editor is nano, and I want to keep it that way. I only want to edit with vi one time. I don't want to change the default to vi then back to nano after editing. Can this be done?
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possible duplicate of askubuntu.com/questions/55022/changing-default-crontab-editor– martinhoMar 9, 2020 at 8:50
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2 Answers
crontab should respect the EDITOR environment variable, so you can just do (for the root crontab for example)
sudo EDITOR=vi crontab -e
From man crontab
The -e option is used to edit the current crontab using the editor
specified by the VISUAL or EDITOR environment variables.
answered Mar 19, 2016 at 19:01
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1I don't think you want
sudohere unless you want to edit really fundamental tasks. Most people run cron jobs at user-level. Also, on Mac OS X if you use sudo it gives an error. Without it it works fine. Dec 5, 2017 at 23:58
Specifying nano as the editor for crontab file
export VISUAL=nano
Specifying vim as the editor for crontab file
export VISUAL=vim
- now, just try it: crontab -e
