Restarting cron after changing crontab file?

Question

Do I have to restart cron after changing the crontable file?

Answer 1

No.

From the cron man page:

...cron will then examine the modification time on all crontabs and reload those which have changed. Thus cron need not be restarted whenever a crontab file is modified

But if you just want to make sure its done anyway,

sudo service cron reload

or

/etc/init.d/cron reload

Answer 2

On CentOS with cPanel sudo /etc/init.d/crond reload does the trick.

On CentOS7: sudo systemctl start crond.service

Answer 3

I had a similar issue on 16.04 VPS Digital Ocean. If you are changing crontabs, make sure to run

sudo service cron restart 

Answer 4

Depending on distribution, using "cron reload" might do nothing. To paste a snippet out of init.d/cron (debian squeeze):

reload|force-reload) log_daemon_msg "Reloading configuration files for periodic command scheduler" "cron"
    # cron reloads automatically
    log_end_msg 0
    ;;

Some developer/maintainer relied on it reloading, but doesn't, and in this case there's not a way to force reload. I'm generating my crontab files as part of a deploy, and unless somehow the length of the file changes, the changes are not reloaded.

Answer 5

try this one for centos 7 : service crond reload

Answer 6

Try this out: sudo cron reload It works for me on ubuntu 12.10

Answer 7

Try this: service crond restart, Hence it's crond not cron.