yeah I agree with Tip #5 at least for a server environment, there are better ways to run things on reboot that need to run on reboot, although for those in the anacron camp, I suppose this level of randomness would appeal / appear entirely reasonable :)

what if you are managing the crons externally, eg puppet, crontab -e is not always option

1. If you don't have a test process for changes made with puppet, this is hardly a problem with cron.

2. Puppet handled that parsing for you and will throw errors if your syntax is wrong

I can't tell you the amount of times I've hit -r by mistake and regretted it..

I can. 0. There, more anecdata.

Honestly though, I never use `-e` either. I keep a ~/.crontab and edit that, and then `crontab ~/.crontab`.

Voila, backup/time machine/git friendly crontab.

I got bit by this once, and had to rescue the crontab out off the disk with GNU strings :(

Have a cronjob that backs up your crontab?

Use /bin/cat as editor. That should work nicely from Puppet.

mtr - the oft forgotten best tool out there, awesome!