[CentOS] crontab and gedit

Wed Jan 23 20:53:13 UTC 2013
Cliff Pratt <enkiduonthenet at gmail.com>

On Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 7:52 AM, Robert Moskowitz <rgm at htt-consult.com> wrote:
>
> 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.
>
That's fine unless you have 100s of machines to administer. If you
have 100 machines do you a) set all the root passwords to the same, or
b) maintain a manual file of logins.

Cheers,

Cliff