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From: Jeff Mincy <mincy AT rcn DOT com>
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Message-ID: <16453.61513.810000.818242@antarres.muniversal.com>
Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2004 09:48:41 -0500
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: crontab: no changes made to crontab
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.56.0403021132490.1337@slinky.cs.nyu.edu>
References: <Pine DOT GSO DOT 4 DOT 56 DOT 0403021132490 DOT 1337 AT slinky DOT cs DOT nyu DOT edu>


> On Tue, 2 Mar 2004, Thorsten Kampe wrote:
>> * Michael Chen (2004-03-02 06:57 +0100)
>> > Dear all, since the first time using "crontab -", I can never change the
>> > crontab file anymore. "crontab -e" calls emacs, but cron just discarded any
>> > new modifications. The emacs saved the "crontab.*****" into /tmp. What's
>> > wrong? Thanks.
>>
>> Try using another editor as Emacs is a GUI editor.
> 
> This has nothing to do with emacs being a GUI editor (which it isn't, BTW,
> or not necessarily).  This does have to do with the editor writing files
> in-place.  I'm not sure if either the native or the Cygwin port of emacs
> does.  That said, Thorsten did provide a good rule of thumb: most GUI
> editors, especially Windows ones, don't write files in place.

Probably OT, but Emacs has several different ways to save files.
This is for XEmacs, (as far as I remember) Emacs works the same way.

See `file-precious-flag'
  This feature works by writing the new contents into a temporary file
  and then renaming the temporary file to replace the original.
  In this way, any I/O error in writing leaves the original untouched,
  and there is never any instant where the file is nonexistent.

crontab -e expects the changes to be made in place, so try
 (setq file-precious-flag nil)

If it works you could add this line as the first line of the crontab.
## -*- file-precious-flag: nil -*-

-jeff


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