On Saturday 08 July 2006 23:16, Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote: > nigel henry wrote: > > Ok. Just ran crontab -e, and again have got my newly created crontab, but > > using vi, so presumably export EDITOR=nano was a one shot thing. I have > > the vi cheat sheet, but I think you have to be using it all the time to > > get really used to working with it, and probably the same goes for emacs. > > I don't use text mode text editors much, and nano is for me the easier to > > use. I'll edit ~/bash_profile and set nano as the editor to be used. > > When you use export <variable>=<value> it only has affect in the > current secession. If you us it in a terminal, it only affects that > terminal, and is gone when you close the terminal. If you do it at > the CLI, it only affects that login secession. Yes I only discovered that after having saved my newly made crontab. I edited the file in /var/spool/cron/$USER to change the time that crontab would run, so as to test if my shell script to play a sound would run. It did, but as Todd has said, I should not have been editing the file in /var/spool/cron/$USER. After reading Todd's comment I ran crontab -e , and sure enough my created crontab was there, but using vi, so as you've said, running export EDITOR=nano is only a one shot thing, and then reverts to the default, in this case vi. I've now changed the editor in ~/bash_profile to nano. Now crontab -e ( that is after logging out and back in) brings up nano. I've learned a bit about crontab. I've learned a bit more about writing shellscripts, although very simple ones, and am very gratefull for the help that you've all given. Thanks. Nigel. > > In this case, if you open a terminal, or log in to the command line, > and run "export EDITOR=nano", then anything that uses the EDITOR > variable to decide what editor to use will use nano. But if you use > "su -" to change users, or log in on another VC, it will not be > affective. The change is also lost when you log out, or close the > terminal. Setting EDITOR affects more then just "crontab -e". > Commands like vipw and vigr also use it. There are others, but those > are the two that come to mind. > > Also, if you are using a terminal under X, you can also use X based > editors like Kedit in place of Nano. If you really wanted to get > fancy, you could write a script that uses the TERM variable to > decide what editor to launch. (Ether EDITOR points to the script, or > the script is run in .bash_profile to set EDITOR when the shell starts. > > Mikkel > -- > > Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, > for thou art crunchy and taste good with Ketchup!
