Why does crontab throw error: "illegal action"

I enter开发者_如何学Goed some cron jobs, everything saved correctly (jobs added) I then went back and typed crontab -e to adjust something and I got a message: "illegal action" I also get this when typing crontab --help or crontab

Wow...now when I open my terminal, I get:

Could not open a new pseudo-tty.

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crontab -e tries to use the editor specified in your environment variable named VISUAL (or missing that in the one named EDITOR). What do you have in those variables? It's impossible for us to guess, but maybe it's some weird value causing the "illegal action" message and/or something that consumes all pseudo-ttys, causing the rest of the problems you report.

crontab --help, to me, says "illegal option" (not "illegal action"!), but that's on my Darwin machine -- you don't deign to mention what version of Unix-oid system you're using and, again, it's impossible to guess from your scant input!-)

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Thanks for your input :). I restarted my computer and everything is working again. Go fig...