CRONTAB MISTAKE

[stovie]

Hi. I hope someone can help me with this problem.
Being a novice to Unix, I editted my crontab directly
by typing " crontab -e ". Well, I needed to make some
changes so, I typed " crontab -r ". Now I have no crontab,
and I can't seem to get crontab to write a new file.

I' ve tried:

vi somefile
crontab somefile

I get the following errors:

crontab:
crontab: error on previous line; unexpected character found in line.

What might be my options from here. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

 

[KenCunningham]

What is in 'somefile'? Sounds like you may have a strange character in there (possibly a control char?). I'd try recreating 'somefile' and try again.

 

[MCorrell]

Hi stovie.

Do you have any known good backup media of some sort? Restoring the file from it might prove to be the fastest way to fix the issue.

 

[stovie]

Thanks for your suggestions. I have corrected the problem
by recreating a root crontab file and placing it in the /usr/spool/crontabs directory.

Now when I type "crontab -l" I see the new crontab file I created; however, I still get the "crontab: error on previous line; unexpected character found in line" error when I try to overwrite my exisiting crontab file with the command "crontab somefile."

 

[stanhubble]

can you post "somefile"

 

[piperent]

If you end the 'crontab' file with a 'nl', you'll get that error. Just be sure the LAST character in the file, is NOT a 'nl' or, from a viewer's standpoint, a blank line.