Edit crontab with NANO on centos (crontab -e)

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Problem: I don’t know where my root users crontab file is, and this doesn’t usually matter because using the command ‘crontab -e’ opens it for editing anyway… but it opens in VI and I am too stupid / lazy / in a rush to use VI.

[Edit – mid 2018: Earlier this year I went through about 3 weeks of IDE/Editor hell and taught myself Vim. It’s… wonderful]

Solution: The -e switch makes the file open in whatever the default editor for the environment is. To override this, pass the EDITOR environment var to the command when it’s run:

sudo env EDITOR=nano crontab -e

Please let me know if this nano tip was useful, just one click!
Nope, not helpful... Yep, more useful than not! – +96 thumb, 124 overall.
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Comments

6 responses to “Edit crontab with NANO on centos (crontab -e)”

September 15, 2015

Allan

It was very nice!! I hate vim with a passion.

Reply
May 30, 2016

Matt

To make it permanent and effective for all users, put a .sh file in /etc/profile.d/ e.g.:

$ nano /etc/profile.d/nano.sh
export VISUAL=”nano”
export EDITOR=”nano”

Log out and log in, then crontab -e will open with nano.

Reply
February 16, 2017

Aleksandr Zaldak

Why one would mess with nano /etc/profile.d/nano.sh ? Just
echo export EDITOR=”nano” >> /etc/profile

Reply
1. April 29, 2017
  
  Barry Docherty
  
  # It’s NOT a good idea to change this file unless you know what you
  # are doing. It’s much better to create a custom.sh shell script in
  # /etc/profile.d/ to make custom changes to your environment, as this
  # will prevent the need for merging in future updates.
  
  That’s why one would mess with nano /etc/profile.d/nano.sh
  
  Reply
November 16, 2017

Mike

$ nano ~/.bash_profile
export VISUAL=”nano”
export EDITOR=”nano”
$ source ~/.bash_profile

Reply
December 24, 2017

Riz

I simply deleted the vi from /usr/bin with rm /usr/bin/vi and nano become the default editor automatically 😀

Reply