75

I have a user on my linux server who has sudo. I want to edit the crontab of another user. I'm new to this though and don't understand what the man pages are telling me yet.

Man crontab tells me I can use this format for the crontab command:

crontab [ -u user ] { -l | -r [ -i ] | -e }

But what does that mean? I want to edit the crontab of a user named jake

so I tried 

crontab jake -e
crontab [jake] -e
crontab [-u jake] -e

And I get the same error every time: "usage error: no arguments permitted after this option"

So what do I type in to edit jake's crontab?

Falcon Momot
  • 25,314
bflora
  • 889
  • 1
    The [ -u user ] means that you can optionally say -u user. I would've expected to see user either in italics (when typeset) or as <user> to indicate that it's not the literal string "user" you need to give, – Vatine Sep 29 '10 at 09:35

2 Answers2

114

Try 

crontab -e -u jake

You will need to be root for this to work.

Darryl Hein
  • 1,772
  • 2
  • 19
  • 21
MadHatter
  • 80,590
  • 14
    sudo crontab -e -u jake would work without being root, and gets logged. Could also su jake and then do crontab -e but sudo much better. – dunxd Sep 29 '10 at 10:23
  • 2
    @dunxd su doesn't work with disabled users or users without login shell. Like www-data is not a user you can switch to on many systems, yet this user has cronjobs to do. – Daniel W. May 19 '20 at 18:51
0

you need sudo/root to edit any of crontab

Rajat
  • 3,349