crontab: temp file must be edited in place

This is an error message I ran into after upgrading vim from 7.0 to 7.1, after editing a crontab file:

  crontab: temp file must be edited in place

What was weird is this error message went away if I deleted my ~/.vimrc file. If ~/.vimrc was blank, the error message was still there, so it wasn’t caused by any command in particular.

It turned out to have something to do with vim’s backup strategy. I am supposing there is a default vimrc file somewhere that gets loaded if ~/.vimrc doesn’t exist.

After some googling, I fixed it by adding the following to my ~/.vimrc file:

  set backupskip=/tmp/*,/private/tmp/*" 

VIM already defaulted this value to ”/tmp/”. I don’t know why defining my own .vimrc made vim not recognize /private/tmp/ as a temp directory any more, but I don’t care enough to find out right now.

Labels: solutions, vim