Editing crontab

[Buster]

Hi,

 

I am experiencing problems with crontab editing om Mandrake 10.0. The only editor I have installed is vi. I want to add a line to root's crontab, so I invoke the editor thus:

# crontab -e

 

which launches vi. I am able to write in the line I want to add, but when I exit (!wq) I end up with the following errormessage:

 

no crontab for root - using an empty one

crontab: installing new crontab

"/tmp/crontab.14449":0: bad month

errors in crontab file, can't install.

Do you want to retry the same edit?

 

If I answer Y vi displaies the line I wrote in, but when I try to save it I get the same error again. Looks like vi is writing rubbish into the file.

What's the remedy for this?

[Qchem]

It sounds like the line you're trying to add isn't in the correct format. What line are you trying to add?

[Buster]

It's:

 

40 * * * * /home/vpopmail/bin/clearopensmtp 2>&1 > /dev/null