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Re[2]: crontab: no changes made


On Tue, 8 Oct 2002, Uwe Mayer wrote:

> 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

I'm a vi person myself, but at a guess, emacs probably reads the value of
'temporary-file-directory' from the environment variable $TEMP.  Windows
by default sets TEMP to the value you mentioned above.  Try setting the
TEMP value in /etc/profile to something better, e.g., "/tmp", as this
variable most likely affects more applications than just emacs (pinfo and
man are two examples that come to mind, sort is probably another).  There
should be no need then to change the emacs variable explicitly.
	Igor
-- 
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ZZZzz /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_		igor@watson.ibm.com
     |,4-  ) )-,_. ,\ (  `'-'		Igor Pechtchanski
    '---''(_/--'  `-'\_) fL	a.k.a JaguaR-R-R-r-r-r-.-.-.  Meow!

"Water molecules expand as they grow warmer" (C) Popular Science, Oct'02, p.51


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