Here's a description of what the crontab -e command does, taken directly from the crontab man page: The documentation further states that the crontab command should be used to edit your crontab file, and you specifically edit the file with the crontab -e command. The Linux crontab documentation is pretty clear about editing the crontab files:Įach user can have their own crontab, and though these are files in /var/spool, they are not intended to be edited directly. After he asked me what that did, we both had a good laugh when I said, “Dude, it automates everything you just did manually.” What “crontab -e” does Thinking he knew something I didn’t know, I asked him why he did all of that work instead of just entering this:Īt the command line. I was working with an experienced Linux sysadmin a few days ago, and when we needed to make a change to the root user’s crontab file, I was surprised to watch him cd to the root cron folder, make changes to the file, then do a kill -HUP on the crontab process. Linux crontab FAQ: How do I edit my Unix/Linux crontab file?

Fbackup edit crontab