Re: cron on 10.5.2 server

In article <b0bm14pqggf0j0fh3eep19p7hej7hadl6t@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
 Howard Brazee <howard@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

> On Fri, 02 May 2008 08:19:31 -0500, Lewis
> <g.kreme@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> 
> >> We're talking about using crontab to edit cron tables, and vi/vim has

> >> beeen the default editor for crontab for, like forever.
> >
> >Except when it's not.
> >
> >crontab actually has no default editor, it simply uses the EDITOR 
> >defined in your environment settings.
> 
> If someone is not interested in using Unix, won't use vi, but does use
> crontab - where should he put his .bash_profile or .bashrc file
> (created with textedit), and should the EDITOR= command look like, &
> what should he name it?
> 
> (This is a real question which I did not feel qualified to answer)

I'm not so sure you really can use a GUI editor to edit cron tables. I 
just tried with EDITOR set to TextWrangler's 'edit' command-line tool, 
and it exited immediately with:

 ex****t EDITOR=/usr/bin/edit
# echo $EDITOR
/usr/bin/edit
# crontab -e
crontab: no changes made to crontab

Not to mention, I fail to see why you'd even *want* to edit Unix cron 
tables with a GUI editor... Anyhow, I'll disregard that and assume you 
really do want to change your editor to a GUI tool...

If you're going to create any Unix configuration files with TextEdit, 
you'd better make damned sure you are saving the file as *Plain Text* 
and with *Unix* line breaks. If TextEdit can;t do this, don't even 
bother running TextEdit.

Personally, I'd just skip TextEdit completely and use a plain text 
editor that is designed for editing such files, like TextWrangler, which 
is free anyway, optionally installs an 'edit' command-line tool that 
allows TextWrangler to function as a replacement to various command-line 
editors.

..bashrc and .bash_profile both belong in your home directory 
(/Users/you). So open TextWrangler, and choose File > Open Hidden from 
the menu bar to look and see if you already have a ~/.bashrc or 
~/.bash_profile. 

If you already have these files, set TextWrangler's Open dialog box 
"Enable" menu to "All", then open the .bashrc file. 

If you don't have .bash_profile, create a new do***ent that has this 
content:

ex****t ENV=~/.bashrc

if test -f ~/.bashrc; then
        . ~/.bashrc
fi

Save the file as ".bash_profile" in your home folder, and be sure to 
click the Options button in the Save dialog box to specify you want 
*Unix* Line Breaks - otherwise the system will not read the file 
correctly.

If you *do* have .bash_profile, just make sure it contains the code 
above so your .bashrc will be source properly.

If you don't have .bashrc, create a new blank do***ent. If you *do* have 
..bashrc, you can just open it and add to the end of it. You'll want to 
add a line to your .bashrc file that says:

ex****t EDITOR=/usr/bin/edit

Save as plain text with Unix line breaks. When you are done, close and 
re-open a terminal window. To verify your changes worked, type:

echo $EDITOR

You should see the path to 'edit' echoed back to you, like this:

# echo $EDITOR
/usr/bin/edit

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JR