You ever go to edit the crontab file on a server, enter the command 'crontab -e', and get a number back? Yeah, happened to me today. I su - into root to edit the crontab and get a number.
It's because the default editor for crontab is 'ed'. To get around this, at least temporarily, you can do the following to make vi the editor for crontab:
#EDITOR=vi
#export EDITOR
Now you can edit the crontab file using the crontab -e command.
And, yes, this is in bash shell.
Mike