How do I edit crontab files with Vim (I get the error: 'temp file must be edited in place')?

Question

How do I edit crontab files in FreeBSD?

$ crontab -e
# ... I do my thing in vim & :wq

"crontab.9ZcXiFaawt" 6L, 203C written
crontab: temp file must be edited in place
Exit 1

Using EDITOR=nvi works fine... Linux also seems to work fine...

Answer 1

The problem is how Vim writes files. By default, it makes a copy of the file and overwrite the original one.

You can observe this with:

# Show the file's inode
$ ls -i a
3156153 a

# Open file in Vim, :wq

# inode changed!
$ ls -i a
3155322 a

crontab gets confused by this (see :help crontab)

You need to use :set backupcopy to yes to make Vim overwrite the original file:

"yes"   make a copy of the file and overwrite the original one

You can do this automatically for crontab files with:

au FileType crontab setlocal bkc=yes

Answer 2

@Martin's self-answer is correct. A variation though, for people like myself who try to limit populating their vimrc file with occasional exceptions -- here editing a crontab, is to use modelines. This allows to place the exceptions directly in the target file.

Below is my crontab modeline:

# vim: nu et tw=130 ts=8 sts=4 sw=4 ff=unix fo-=l fo+=tcroq2 bkc=yes

The important bit here is the bkc=yes which matches @Martin's vimrc configuration. The rest are personal convenience settings.

This said for completeness and food for thought, @Martin's initial answer is the most adequate in the majority of cases.

Answer 3

Not the same error but also happening quite often:

Error detected while processing /root/.vimrc:
line    2:
E319: Sorry, the command is not available in this version: syntax enable
line    7:
...

This error will show up, if you use vi instead of vim for crontab. You need to set the editor of crontab by adding the following code in your ~/.bashrc file:

export EDITOR=vim

Answer 4

The same happens on OSX. After investigating the problem, I've found it works with plain vi, but it doesn't work with vim.

So the fix could be:

EDITOR=vi crontab -e

However vi is usually linked to vim (e.g. on OSX) so it's the same thing.

---

This can be solved by the following line in your vimrc file:

au BufNewFile,BufRead crontab.* set nobackup | set nowritebackup

---

There is another workaround for this by adding the following lines to .vimrc file:

if $VIM_NOBACKUP
  set nobackup
  set nowritebackup
endif

and run the command:

VIM_NOBACKUP=1 crontab -e

You may also try to define the following variable:

EDITOR='VIM_NOBACKUP=1 vim'

Source: crontab: temp file must be edited in place

---

The reason what this is happening has to do with the way vim/vi treats backup files.