my.cnf cannot be saved

[K L]

I have MariaDB 10.1 installed on a Centos 6.X server. I have been trying to change the innodb_buffer_pool_size in the my.cnf file (in the /etc directory) and I cannot save any changes I make to the file. I've tried to do it after taking the database offline but that did not work. What is the reason that I cannot make this change? I logged in as root to the server so I don't believe this is a file permission issue. I can't figure out what the issue could be. Help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks.