cron abuse

[Don Wilde]

I reinstalled my crontab (with crontab -e) after a user edited the
crontab directly and nothing appears to be working now. The mails I
get suggest that it's trying to find 'root' and 'operator' as
programs. Would somebody kindly help me recover from this copilot
error? I can't find anything in crontab(5) or cron(8).

My procedure was to

  invoke crontab -e (getting a blank emacs editor window),
  split the window, opening a copy of the /etc/crontab
  copied the contents into the temporary crontab
  save and exit
  kill -1 1

these are the e-mails I'm getting

Subject:  	 Cron <root at dragonfire> root /usr/libexec/atrun

root: not found

TIA!

Don Wilde