crontab: no changes made to crontab

[Matthew Miller]

On Tue, Nov 14, 2006 at 03:46:18PM -0600, Matthew Benjamin wrote:
> Can someone tell me if they have run into this problem before? I am trying
> to create a cron job, to no avail. Anytime I go to create the job (as root)
> I type crontab -e, put the commands in however when it is time to save I
> save what I believe should be successful. When I type the command crontab
> -l, it says no crontab for root.
> Also after saving the crontab (:wq), I get the following message, "crontab:
> no changes made to crontab" without the quotes. I have restarted the cron
> daemon to no avail.

I haven't seen this particular problem, but I do have a tip. Rather than
editing the root user's personal crontab, it's often more manageable to put
system cron entries in /etc/cron.d (note the slightly different format of
the files there -- an extra field for the user to run as). Or, if it's a
once-a-day thing, drop a script in /etc/cron.daily.

-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org          <http://mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>              <http://linux.bu.edu/>