Is there a way to validate /etc/crontab’s format?

Question

I prefer to stick scheduled tasks in /etc/crontab so I can see at a glance what's scheduled to run, regardless of which user the task runs as.

The only gotcha is that the format isn't validated on save, unlike crontab -e -- so a stray character can quietly break the entire cron.

Is there a way to validate the /etc/crontab format before/after save?

Answer 1

This has already been answered over on Stack Overflow.

Answer 2

Wicked cool shell scripts by Dave Taylor has a shell script that validates crontab files.

You can get the script at the site for the books: verifycron.
Thanks to seth for the hint.