crontab edit produces a number and does not open the editor in ubuntu 16.04 server

Question

I want to add a crontab entry.
When I run the command

crontab -e

I just get a number as output! How to fix this issue?

Answer 1

crontab gets opened with the default editor, which is saved in the EDITOR environment variable.

for me, this is vim:

$ echo $EDITOR
vim

You can run crontab overriding the default editor like this:

EDITOR=editor-of-your-choice crontab -e

to permanently select a default editor, you can simply run this and choose the right number:

select-editor

then, crontab -e should now open with your editor of choice.

See this related question: Changing default crontab editor