‘crontab -e’ command returns a number and a ‘?’
Sometimes when you try to edit a crontab file using crontab -e command, it prints a number and a ‘?’. This is because by default the editor used by crontab -e command is the default solaris editor ‘ed’ and not vi editor. When ed starts up it prints the number of characters in the crontab file and does not have a prompt.
To avoid this, simple com out of the ed editor by typing q. Now set the EDITOR environmental variable to vi and run crontab -e again :
# EDITOR=vi
# export EDITOR