How to specify a editor to open crontab file? “export EDITOR=vi” does not work

Question

I\'m using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, and I want to set the vim editor to edit the crontab file.

If I run echo $EDITOR, I get vim. But when I run c

Answer 1

Very probable that your VISUAL environment variable is set to something else. Try:

export VISUAL=vi

Answer 2

I think you might need to use the full path:

export EDITOR=/usr/bin/vim

Answer 3

It wasn't working for me. I run crontab with sudo, so I switched to root, did the above suggestions, and crontab would open in vim, but it still wouldn't from my user account. Finally I ran sudo select-editor from the user account and that did the trick.

Answer 4

This worked for me :

EDITOR="/usr/bin/vim"
export EDITOR

Add this to ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bashrc to enable this for current user.

Answer 5

You can use below command to open it in VIM editor.

export VISUAL=vim; crontab -e

Note: Please make sure VIM editor is installed on your server.

Answer 6

export EDITOR=vim worked for me