"crontab -e" failing under Monterey with "$EDITOR: No such file or directory"

Question

I was hoping for a little guidance with a problem that has me beaten.

I want to use cronjobs on a Mac Mini running macOS Monterey, but it is not behaving as it does on other machines I have running Debian.

When I run crontab -l, I get what you would expect, in this case;

# m  h  dom mon dow   command

which is how I left it a few versions of macOS ago.

However, when I run crontab -e, I get the rather more unexpected;

crontab: $EDITOR: No such file or directory
crontab: "$EDITOR" exited with status 1

The EDITOR variable is set to /usr/local/bin/nvim, and nvim works perfectly as I am using it now to draft this post.

The only things a broad Google search has shown me are:

1. I needed to ensure that cron was granted Full Disk Access in macOS Security settings

and:

2. that this does not seem to be a normal issue people have encountered.

Could someone point me towards a solution, please?

Answer 1

The error message you get indicates that the EDITOR variable is set to the literal value $EDITOR:

$ EDITOR='$EDITOR' crontab -e
crontab: $EDITOR: No such file or directory
crontab: "$EDITOR" exited with status 1

To fix run

export EDITOR=/usr/local/bin/nvim
export VISUAL="$EDITOR"
/usr/bin/crontab -e

and check the init files of your shell for the wrong definition.

Answer 2

TL;DR;

setting $VISUAL to /usr/bin/nano makes the crontab -eworking for me!

Details

I ran in a similar issue on Monterey in zsh but it was due to SublimeText was configured as default editor:

echo $EDITOR
# output:
subl -w

When trying to edit the crontab of either user or root I got:

crontab -e # or
sudo crontab -e

# output
crontab: subl -w: No such file or directory
crontab: "subl -w" exited with status 1

Neither solutions from other suggestions worked:

• to change the $VISUAL editor variable to subl -w
• omitting the -w

or

• editing the sudoers file via visudo helped not (to get visudo to work, I had to set both $EDITOR and $VISUAL to nothing)

export EDITOR=""
export VISUAL=""

actually the suggested line was already present!

Defaults env_keep += "EDITOR VISUAL"

Possible low level shell path issue

At the end it turns out to be related to the regular $PATH is not to be accessible by the crontab command. Even symlinks seemed not to work until I set the $VISUAL setting different from $EDITOR to /usr/bin/nano. Then it started working using nano with an explicit absolute path.

export VISUAL=/usr/bin/nano 

Standard $EDITOR Setting can be preserved

For crontab usage it is irrelevant if $EDITOR is set to nothing or subl -w, both are suitable!

IMPORTANT:

To make these changes permanent you have to put the export lines in your terminal startup file ( ~/.zshrc or ``~/.profile depending on your setup)

Make sure you granted Full Disk Access to crontab and cron in ``System Preferences```

• Giving cron full disk access

  If you are using [[macOS]] [[Catalina]] (or higher) you will also need to give the cron service Full Disk Access.
  • Go to the System Preferences and select Security & Privacy.
  • In the left-hand column, select Full Disk Access, click thepadlock icon, enter your password and click on the plus icon for a file browser to appear.
  • When the file browser appears, press ⌘ ⇧ G to open the go to folder dialog and type: /usr/sbin/cron
  • Press Go to close the dialog and confirm that cron appears in the list of apps that have full disk access in the Security & Privacy window.
  • Repeat with /usr/bin/crontab