Re[2]: crontab: no changes made

[Uwe Mayer <merkosh at planet-interkom dot de>]

Hallo,

I found the solution to the emacs problem discussed below:

Monday, October 7, 2002, 3:44:41 AM, you wrote:

IP> On Sat, 5 Oct 2002, Uwe Mayer wrote:

>> When I start "crontab -e" it won't run, because I haven't vi
>> installed. I remembered reading something about an EDITOR or VISIBLE
>> environment variable, though I couldn't find it any more. Thus I set

IP> The correct name for the variable is VISUAL, although EDITOR also works.

>> export EDITOR=emacs
>>
>> Then crontabs starts up emacs, editing a temporary file (i.e.
>> /tmp/cron.1900)
>> However, when I close emacs (with or without saveing changes to the
>> tmp file) crontab displays "crontab: no changes made to crontab".
>>
>> Where's the flaw?

IP> If you are running Cygwin emacs, make sure it's writing the file in place.
IP> In a separate shell, check that the inode number of the temp file is the
IP> same before and after emacs has written the changes (using 'ls -i').
IP>         Igor

George Lefter (<3DA1B267.2010500@mkco.ro>):
In this case its no problem with cron. Igor was right. Bevore writing
to a file emacs *renames* the old file to <filename>~ and stores the
new buffer under the same name.

I had a search on "info emacs" and under node "Backup" I found out
that:

>    For most files, the variable `make-backup-files' determines whether
> to make backup files.  On most operating systems, its default value is
> `t', so that Emacs does write backup files.

So you could either turn off backups,

>    The default value of the `backup-enable-predicate' variable prevents
> backup files being written for files in the directories used for
> temporary files, specified by `temporary-file-directory' or
> `small-temporary-file-directory'.

check the "temporary-file-directory" variable in the *scratch* buffer:
temporary-file-directory C-x C-e

In my case it defaulted to "<something>/<something>/mydocu~1/temp".
Which is IMHO an impractical default value. I added the following line
to my .emacs file:

(set 'temporary-file-directory "/tmp")

Now it works!

Harig, Mark A.(<BADF3C947A1BD54FBA75C70C241B0B9E762F76@ex02.idirect.net>):
I am useing Windows 2000, not NT.
And what concerns the group and user ownership. I changed them
temporaryly and started crontab. After editing the tab file with
crontab the user and group membership were restored automatically to
<user>:SYSTEM.

Thanks for all your comments and suggestions!

Ciao
Uwe                            mailto:merkosh@planet-interkom.de


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