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