Bug 35985

Summary:	"crontab -r" behavior
Product:	[Retired] Red Hat Linux	Reporter:	Red Hat Bugzilla <bugzilla>
Component:	vixie-cron	Assignee:	Jason Vas Dias <jvdias>
Status:	CLOSED CURRENTRELEASE	QA Contact:	David Lawrence <dkl>
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	6.2	CC:	oliver
Target Milestone:	---	Keywords:	FutureFeature
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	i386
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:	vixie-cron-4.1-8	Doc Type:	Enhancement
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2004-08-10 21:55:30 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Red Hat Bugzilla 2001-04-16 01:19:38 UTC

The "-r" option of "crontab" command is USELESS and often HARMFUL.
(It's easy to mistype "-e" as "-r"!)

Please
  disable "-r" option
or
  change to make backup file.

Comment 1 Red Hat Bugzilla 2001-09-27 18:02:44 UTC

I agree.
The R key is next to the E key.
At least there should be a confirmation prior to delete your crontab.
A crontab is a really usefull config, and is likelly that you will never
will want to delete a crontab file.

Please disable the -r option.

Thanks
Oliver

Comment 2 Red Hat Bugzilla 2002-08-14 10:40:34 UTC

*** Bug 54119 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 3 Red Hat Bugzilla 2002-12-10 23:17:22 UTC

Please don't remove "crontab -r". It's a standard crontab option, and it makes 
programmatic manipulation of crontab files a lot easier. My site depends on it 
for some scripts which do automatic error-handling for our automated jobs.

Comment 4 Red Hat Bugzilla 2002-12-10 23:51:18 UTC

I think a good solution would be to add an -i option, like cp and mv have.
Then, people wanting the new feature will only need to add:
alias crontab="crontab -i"
to the their /etc/bashrc file

Comment 5 Red Hat Bugzilla 2004-08-10 21:55:30 UTC

This is now fixed in vixie-cron-4.1-8 . 
There is now a '-i' modifier of the '-r' crontab delete 
option that will prompt for Y/y before actually deleting
the crontab, similar to 'cp -i' / 'mv -i'.