Re: trixie and "crontab -e"
Greg Wooledge wrote on 11/7/25 8:06 AM:
I'm starting to suspect crontab is invoking a terminal that doesn't
work like "nano" or "vi". Maybe it's some emacs client stub thing that
communicates with an emacs daemon thing? Who knows. It would help
if you told us what editor you're using.
Ah! Very helpful. OK, soooo....
---
[ZB:~] echo $VISUAL
/usr/bin/kate -n
[ZB:~]
---
To work around that, crontab(1) uses the VISUAL environment variable to
decide which editor to invoke. What happens if you do:
VISUAL=nano crontab -e
It works :-)
Now, I wonder why kate isn't being invoked correctly (it's worked fine for
this purpose for the past, I don't know, ten years perhaps).
If I do:
[ZB:~] export VISUAL=/usr/bin/kate
[ZB:~] crontab -e
Then I get the immediate "No modification made" message, and kate opens with
an empty crontab file (BTW, it really is true that the "No modification made"
message is immediate: it's written to the terminal *before* the kate editor
session appears).
If I try:
[ZB:~] export VISUAL="/usr/bin/kate -n"
[ZB:~] crontab -e
then the same happens (i.e., the "-n" option makes no difference, which I
believe is the correct behaviour: basically, it just tells the system to
invoke a new instance even if kate is already running).
Any thoughts as to why my long-time setting of VISUAL to "/usr/bin/kate -n" is
now misbehaving?
If I really *have* to, I can give up and just use nano; but I'd much rather be
able to continue to use kate to edit the crontab file.
Doc
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