On Wed, Jul 01, 2026 at 18:55:28 -0600, Charles Curley wrote: > On Wed, 1 Jul 2026 15:27:37 -0600 > "D. R. Evans" <[email protected]> wrote: > > > On the machine where it works, I have VISUAL='/usr/bin/kate -b -n'... > > and... if I do exactly the same on the machine that I just upgraded, > > "crontab -e" suddenly works. Yay!!! Dark magic! > > Odd. According to apt-file, the executable for kate is where you show > it, /usr/bin. There are plenty of other useful executables there. So > that should be in your path. However, crontab may clear the path (or not > inherit it). Have you exported it? > > In any case, using the fully qualified path is usualy a good practice. > > I'm glad that solved your problem.
It's not the path that mattered. It's the -b option, which (according to the man page I found on Debian's web site) tells the Kate command line process to block and wait for the editor instance to finish before exiting. Without -b, we can deduce that the Kate command line process is sending the edit request to an "already running Kate instance", and then terminating, at which point crontab checks the file, sees no change, and reports the lack of changes, leaving the installed crontab unchanged.
