[CentOS] crontab and gedit

Wed Jan 23 18:52:29 UTC 2013
Robert Moskowitz <rgm at htt-consult.com>

On 01/23/2013 01:39 PM, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote:
> Robert Moskowitz wrote:
>> On 01/23/2013 06:23 AM, Adekoya Adekunle wrote:
>>> How can I open crontab with gedit any any other editor ?
>>>
>>> i want to edit my cron jobs with other editors beside vi.
>>   From a terminal window:
>>
>> su
>> gedit /etc/crontab &
>>
>> I do it all the time.  I suppose there is a one line variant with sudo,
>> but I tend to have a root terminal open for lots of different things.
> Bad idea. Very much depreciated. You should edit crontab using -e [1], and
> sudoers with visudo.
>
> 1] to use a different editor, from the man pages:
> ENVIRONMENT
>
>         VISUAL          Invoked by visudo as the editor to use
>
>         EDITOR          Used by visudo if VISUAL is not set
>
> Using the correct tool invokes syntax checking *before* it's saved. If you
> don't have root password, you could seriously be up the creek if you make
> a typo in sudoers....

Serious typos abound.  The most serious one I did was to fstab once upon 
a time.

I don't use sudo.  If I need root changes, I better have the root 
password to use su.  If I don't have the root password, then it is 
either not my system to change, or I have a serious problem indeed.