crontab -r deletes cron entries without asking for confirmation

Hallo Anonymous,

there are a crontab for the system and a crontab for each user. You can make your entries to /etc/crontab and have to be root to edit and remove.
To save your "user" crontab I think you have to back it up.

Greets

Telling the user to manually back up a file because the program might delete it with no warning is NOT a good solution.

Totally ignored, and marked invalid. Typical.

This is a valid request. I've linked this bug to the corresponding bug in Debian's cron.

I just wanted to mention that on many keyboards the letters e and r are adjacent and that "crontab -e" is a very common command.
this increases the risk that someone might mistakenly delete his user crontab while trying to edit it

set the default behaviour of deleting a crontab to be prompt (and enable suppressing this with -I)

The attachment "crontab_patch" seems to be a patch. If it isn't, please remove the "patch" flag from the attachment, remove the "patch" tag, and if you are a member of the ~ubuntu-reviewers, unsubscribe the team.

[This is an automated message performed by a Launchpad user owned by ~brian-murray, for any issues please contact him.]

Here's a whole bunch of people who have accidentally run `-r` when they meant `e` (including me!)

* https://twitter.com/search?q=crontab%20e%20r&src=typed_query
* https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37852940/how-recover-deleted-crontab-r-option
* https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/5h1bh5/psa_do_not_type_crontab_r_when_you_mean_crontab_e/
* https://b3z13r.wordpress.com/2011/02/09/how-to-rebuild-crontab-from-scratch-after-accidentally-typing-crontab-r/

Please can someone to implement the attached patch.

These are only the ones stubborn enough to.complain. there are so.many
others...

On Sat, Jul 27, 2019, 10:53 PM Terence Eden <email address hidden>
wrote:

> Here's a whole bunch of people who have accidentally run `-r` when they
> meant `e` (including me!)
>
> * https://twitter.com/search?q=crontab%20e%20r&src=typed_query
> *
> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37852940/how-recover-deleted-crontab-r-option
> *
> https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/5h1bh5/psa_do_not_type_crontab_r_when_you_mean_crontab_e/
> *
> https://b3z13r.wordpress.com/2011/02/09/how-to-rebuild-crontab-from-scratch-after-accidentally-typing-crontab-r/
>
> Please can someone to implement the attached patch.
>
> --
> You received this bug notification because you are subscribed to the bug
> report.
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1451286
>
> Title:
> crontab -r deletes cron entries without asking for confirmation
>
> Status in cron package in Ubuntu:
> Confirmed
> Status in cron package in Debian:
> New
>
> Bug description:
> type: crontab -r
>
> Expected use case : should ask user if they really want to delete this
> file, of which there are no backups on the system by default, and may
> take hours to restore by hand, if it's even possible.
>
> what happens: user's cron entry is deleted with no warning.
>
> To manage notifications about this bug go to:
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cron/+bug/1451286/+subscriptions
>

I'm glad my initial stubborness is leading to this avalanche of users echoing me. I feel all your pain, I have been there and it sucks!

I would suggest this update/patch needs to go into not only the new versions of Ubuntu, but also the LTS distribution repos also, as a stability bugfix.

I made a ticket in the Mint repos about the bug called systemd and they insta-banned me, lol. I still run Ubuntu 14.04 because I am not interesting in running systemd as pid1, or at all. I'll probably be off to slackware soon.

It's been real, Ubuntu.

Just accidentally hit it.... Very big crontab. Thanks God I just yesterday made a backup.

www@weare:/home/eugene$ crontab -r
www@weare:/home/eugene$ crontab -e
no crontab for oxwww - using an empty one
No modification made

Hasn't this been fixed and pushed into repos yet? I thought it was a confirmed bug with an easy fix? I'd like to see this fix backported to LTS and even previous ubuntu versions, like 14.04.