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Ian
Asked: 2009-06-05 08:58:45 +0800 CST

Change default crontab editor to nano in FreeBSD

  • 772

When I edit the crontab using crontab -e it opens the crontab in vi. I'd prefer it to use nano. How can I change this?

EDIT:

For some reason the export command returns command not found. And changing the EDITOR env value didn't work for crontab -e.

The following command worked on my system:

setenv VISUAL /usr/local/bin/nano

linux cron freebsd vi

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    For sh based shells:

    export EDITOR=/path/to/nano

    For C shell based:

    setenv EDITOR /path/to/nano

    Remember that unless you save these setting to your login profile script (/home/user/.bash_profile for example), you lose the setting at log out.

    If I remember correctly, FreeBSD uses C shell as the default user shell.

    • 14

  2. Should be

    export EDITOR=/usr/bin/nano

    adjust for your location of nano (use 'which' to find). You can put that command in your .bashrc or similar profile script to have it in effect all the time.

    • 1

  3. Probably by setting the environment variable EDITOR.

    I.e.

    export EDITOR=/path/to/nano
    • -1

  4. There is a symbolic link under /etc/alternatives/editor that can be pointed to /path/to/nano

    You can use the update-alternatives utility to do this as well - although I am not too familiar with using it.

    (note - I'm speaking from an 'ubuntu' point-of-view. not sure if this is the same for FreeBSD)

    • -3