How to specify a editor to open crontab file export EDITOR vi does not work

Question

I m using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5  and I want to set the vim editor to edit the crontab file    If I run echo  EDITOR  I get vim  But when I run  crontab -e  I get different editor

User · Answer

You can use below command to open it in VIM editor   export VISUAL vim  crontab -e   Note  Please make sure VIM editor is installed on your server

User · Answer

It wasn t working for me  I run crontab with sudo  so I switched to root  did the above suggestions  and crontab would open in vim  but it still wouldn t from my user account  Finally I ran sudo select-editor from the user account and that did the trick

User · Answer

export EDITOR vim worked for me

User · Answer

Very probable that your VISUAL environment variable is set to something else  Try   export VISUAL vi

User · Answer

If the above methods don t work  as they didn t work on my Ubuntu 13 04 installation  try   There are a number of alternative ways   1  Run select-editor  select-editor   2  Manually edit the file     selected editor specifying your preferred editor   With this option you can specify editor parameters     Generated by  usr bin select-editor SELECTED EDITOR   usr bin emacs -nw    3  You can specify on the fly on the commandline with   env VISUAL  emacs -nw  crontab -e

User · Answer

I think you might need to use the full path   export EDITOR  usr bin vim

User · Answer

To quote the man      The -e option is used to edit the current crontab using the editor specified by the VISUAL or  EDITOR  environment  variables   Most often if you run crontab -e from X  you have VISUAL set  that s what is used  Try this   VISUAL vi crontab -e  It just worked for me

User · Answer

This worked for me    EDITOR   usr bin vim  export EDITOR   Add this to    bash profile or    bashrc to enable this for current user

[linux] How to specify a editor to open crontab file? "export EDITOR=vi" does not work

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