Appending to crontab with a shell script on Ubuntu

Question

I'm trying to add a line to the crontab on Ubuntu.

Right now, I'm doing crontab -e and editing the crontab there.

However, I can't seem to find the real crontab file, since crontab -e seems to give you a temporary working copy.

/etc/crontab looks like the system crontab.

What is the path of the crontab that crontab -e saves to?

Thanks!

Answer 1

You can also do it without a temporary file:

(crontab -l ; echo "0 4 * * * myscript")| crontab -

Answer 2

Use crontab -l > file to list current user's crontab to the file, and crontab file, to install new crontab.

Answer 3

If your crontab is empty you should use 2>/dev/null:

(crontab -l 2>/dev/null; echo "0 4 * * * myscript")| crontab -