Would be quite nice if crontab -e did something to avoid concurrent sessions with the last one silently overwriting any previous changes. Issuing a warning if a file has been changed since reading it in (by comparing temporary and spooled file timestamps) should be good enough: * check out spooled file for editing while saving its timestamp * edit * check saved timestamp against current spooled file's one * issue a warning if it's older already, or * check edited file into spool PS: yes I just [almost] did fall to this one. :)