crontab -e fails to run

Question

when i run "crontab -e" i get:

/usr/bin/editor: line 40: /tmp/crontab.BTXqyZ/crontab: Permission denied
/usr/bin/editor: line 40: exec: /tmp/crontab.BTXqyZ/crontab: cannot execute: Success
crontab: "/usr/bin/editor" exited with status 126

crontab -e was working fine a few months ago. a cron job i set up few month ago is still running successfully.

i wanted to create a new cronjob for another program and i got the above error....

Answer 1

You have a permissions problem. Your /tmp directory may be mounted noexec and for some reason your version of cron doesn't like that, /tmp may have some sort of silly permissions on it (it should be 1777), your /usr/bin/editor is up the creek, or whatever /usr/bin/editor points to may be similarly broken. I'd test /usr/bin/editor on something else to eliminate that as the source of the problem, then go to town on /tmp.

Answer 2

May be /tmp access mode is wrong. Check it with ls -dla /tmp

Right mode for tmp is 1777 (drwxrwxrwt)

$ ls -dla /tmp drwxrwxrwt 7 root root 4096 Jan 12 00:00 /tmp

Correct it with sudo chmod 1777 /tmp. 1 is sticky bit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sticky_bit and 7 is read-write-execute for user, group, world