crontab -r
Posted by matijs
I don’t use the crontab command on my own machines (I just put files in
/etc/cron*), but recent experience on another machine made me wonder why
crontab has the following options (this is from crontab --help):
-e (edit user's crontab)
-l (list user's crontab)
-r (delete user's crontab)Right. E is for edit, L is for list, R is for delete. Makes sense. And as a bonus, it is easier to accidentally delete your crontab when you want to edit it.
Brilliant.
Jurjen said 1 day later:
It’s the help text that is deceiving, I think it should be:
“-r (remove user’s crontab)”
Besides that I fail to see a problem, other than you ignoring the case sensitivity of the OS commands in your comment :-) That is, unless you whished to do something recursively with your crontab and thus deleting it.
Matijs said 4 days later:
@Jurjen: Well, I cheated a little of course, because the man page does say remove. Call it poetic license. I’m mainly stunned that the most-used option and the most destructive option are one fat-fingered typo away from each other.
-dwould have already been better, but when a program has only three options, why not use, e.g.,-e,-land-x?