Restarting cron after changing crontab file? [closed]

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

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

On CentOS7: sudo systemctl start crond.service

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

sudo service cron restart 

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.