Mail Archives: cygwin/2002/11/26/11:08:45
Jon LaBadie writes:
> On Mon, Nov 25, 2002 at 09:07:16PM +0000, trevin wrote:
>> I've recently installed Cygwin on a Windows 2000 Pro machine. Installation
>> was done under a user account. I tried to install a cron job by running:
>>
>> EDITOR=emacs crontab -e
>>
>> After reading through the mailing lists on a similar problem, I remembered
>> to set the variable 'make-backup-files' to nil, and verified that the inum
>> for the temporary file remained unchanged after saving the file. However,
>> when I exit out of emacs, nothing happens. It returns to the bash prompt
>> with no messages. According to crontab -l, the table was not installed.
>>
>> Any other ideas what could be wrong?
>
> crontab (on unicies anyway) won't install if the editor exits with a
> non-zero status. Some old vi's used to reflect any error you made
> during editing in a non-zero exit status.
>
> You might try to making your EDITOR a shell script "fakeemacs" that contains:
>
> /path/to/real/emacs $*
> rc=$?
> echo $rc > /tmp/real_emacs_exit_status
> exit $rc
>
> If this shows in the real_emacs_exit_status file a non-zero value,
> that may be your culprit. Confirm it by changing the last line to exit 0.
Just to let everybody know, the above suggestion helped me find the real
culprit: emacs. emacs was not even exiting properly at all; the
/tmp/real_emacs_exit_status file never got written out. Also, the
/tmp/crontab.* files were never cleaned up. It appears that emacs *kills*
its parent when you exit.
So I downloaded and used the nano editor instead, and it works. It's not
crontab's fault; it's a bug in emacs.
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