Why I ve got no crontab entry on OS X when using vim

Question

I would like to use cron on my Mac  I choose it over launchd  because I want to be able to use my new knowledge on Linux as well  However  I cannot seem to get the crontab -e command to work  It fires up vim  I enter my test job   0-59         mollerhoj3 echo  Hello World    But after saving and quitting   wq    crontab -l   says   No crontab for mollerhoj3   What am I doing wrong

User · Answer

The use of cron on OS X is discouraged   launchd is used instead   Try man launchctl to get started   You have to create special XML files that define your jobs and put them in a special place with certain permissions   You ll usually just need to figure out launchctl load  http   developer apple com library mac  documentation Darwin Reference ManPages man1 launchctl 1 html  http   nb nathanamy org 2012 07 schedule-jobs-using-launchd   Edit  If you really do want to use cron on OS X  check out this answer  https   superuser com a 243944 2449

User · Answer

NOTE  the answer that says to use the ZZ command doesn t work for me on my Mavericks system  but this is probably due to something in my vim configuration because if I start with a pristine  vimrc  the accepted answer works  My answer might work for you if the other solution doesn t   On MacOS X  according to the crontab manpage  the crontab temporary file that gets created with crontab -e needs to be edited in-place   Vim doesn t edit in-place by default  but it might do some special case to support crontab -e   so if your  EDITOR environment variable is set to vi  the default  or vim  editing the crontab will always fail     To get Vim to edit the file in-place  you need to do    setlocal nowritebackup   That should enable you to update the crontab when you do crontab -e with the  wq or ZZ commands    You can add an autocommand in your  vimrc to make this automatically work when editing crontabs   autocmd FileType crontab setlocal nowritebackup   Another way is to add the setlocal nowritebackup to    vim after ftplugin crontab vim  which will be loaded by Vim automatically when you re editing a crontab file if you have the Filetype plugin enabled  You can also check for the OS if you re using your vim files across multiple platforms     In    vim after ftplugin crontab vim if has  mac     setlocal nowritebackup endif

User · Answer

Use another text editor  env EDITOR nano crontab -e    or   env EDITOR code crontab -e

User · Answer

I ve never had this problem  but I create a    crontab file and edit that  which allows me to back it up  Time Machine or otherwise   then run  crontab    crontab   Has worked for me for 20  years across many flavors of unix

User · Answer

Just follow these steps    In Terminal  crontab -e  Press i to go into vim s insert mode  Type your cron job  for example   30          usr bin curl --silent --compressed http   example com crawlink php  Press Esc to exit vim s insert mode  Type ZZ to exit vim  must be capital letters    You should see the following message  crontab  installing new crontab  You can verify the crontab file by using crontab -l    Note however that this might not work depending on the content of your    vimrc file

User · Answer

The above has a mix of correct answers  What worked for me for having the exact same errors are   1  edit your bash config file       cd    amp  amp  vim  bashrc   2  in your bash config file  make sure default editor is vim rather than vi  which causes the problem      export EDITOR vim   3  edit your vim config file      cd    amp  amp  vim  vimrc   4  make sure set backupcopy is yes in your  vimrc     set backupcopy yes   5  restart terminal  6  now try crontab edit       crontab -e      10         echo  hello world    You should see that it creates the crontab file correctly  If you exit vim  either ZZ or  wq  and list crontab with following command  you should see the new cron job  Hope this helps        crontab -l

User · Answer

The error crontab  temp file must be edited in place is because of the way vim treats backup files   To use vim with cron  add the following lines in your  bash profile export EDITOR vim alias crontab  VIM CRONTAB true crontab   Source the file  source  bash profile  And then in your  vimrc add  if  VIM CRONTAB     true      set nobackup     set nowritebackup endif  This will disable backups when using vim with cron  And you will be able to use crontab -e to add edit cronjobs   On successfully saving your cronjob  you will see the message  crontab  installing new crontab  Source  http   drawohara com post 6344279 crontab-temp-file-must-be-edited-in-placeenter link description here

User · Answer

Other option is not to use crontab -e at all  Instead I used    crontab -l  amp  amp  echo  1 1          path to my script sh     crontab -   Notice that whatever you print before   crontab - will replace the entire crontab file  so use crontab -l  amp  amp  echo   lt your new schedule gt   to get the previous content and the new schedule

User · Answer

Difference between cron and launchd As has been mentioned cron is deprecated  but supported   and launchd is recommended for OS X  This is taken from developer apple com Effects of Sleeping and Powering Off If the system is turned off or asleep  cron jobs do not execute  they will not run until the next designated time occurs  If you schedule a launchd job by setting the StartCalendarInterval key and the computer is asleep when the job should have run  your job will run when the computer wakes up  However  if the machine is off when the job should have run  the job does not execute until the next designated time occurs  All other launchd jobs are skipped when the computer is turned off or asleep  they will not run until the next designated time occurs  Consequently  if the computer is always off at the job   s scheduled time  both cron jobs and launchd jobs never run  For example  if you always turn your computer off at night  a job scheduled to run at 1 A M  will never be run

User · Answer

As the previous posts didn t work for me because of some permissions issues  I found that creating a separate crontab file and adding it to the user s crontab with the -u parameter while root worked for me   sudo crontab -u  USERNAME     PATH TO CRONTAB FILE

User · Answer

In user crontab  crontab -e  do not put the user field   Correct cron is   0-59         echo  Hello World    Syntax with user field is for  etc crontab only   0-59         mollerhoj3 echo  Hello World

User · Answer

I did 2 things to solve this problem    I touched the crontab file  described in this link coderwall com p ry9jwg   Thanks  Andy   Used Emacs instead of my default vim  EDITOR emacs crontab -e  I have no idea why vim does not work    crontab -lnow prints the cronjobs  Now I only need to figure out why the cronjobs are still not running  -

[macos] Why I've got no crontab entry on OS X when using vim?

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