In my 14 years of working with Linux I’ve never done that… But there comes a time in every man’s life to accidentally issue crontab -r instead of crontab -e.
Yes, that removes the current crontab. Yes, the buttons "e" and "r" are conveniently located next to each other. No, it doesn’t prompt for any sort of confirmation. And yes, like the old saying goes, *nix is very user-friendly – it’s just choosy about who its friends are.
What to do:
- Backups, obviously;
- If you’re messing with the crontab, chances are, you’ve already edited it recently. Use a terminal emulator with an “instant replay” feature, like iTerm2, to go back in time slightly;
- Grab the commands from the syslog. On Debian, this is a good starting point:
grep CRON /var/log/syslog | awk '{$1=$2=$3=$4=$5=$6=$7=""; print $0}' | sort | uniq - Add an alias to your favorite shell:
alias crontab="crontab -i"