Try this: service crond restart, Hence it's crond not cron.
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.
There are instances wherein cron needs to be restarted in order for the start up script to work. There's nothing wrong in restarting the cron.
sudo service cron restart
1) If file /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root edit via SFTP client - need service cron restart.
Reload service not work.
2) If edit file /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root via console linux (nano, mc) - restart NOT need.
3) If edit cron via crontab -e - restart NOT need.
Ubuntu 18.04 * Usage: /etc/init.d/cron {start|stop|status|restart|reload|force-reload}
try this one for centos 7 : service crond reload
I had a similar issue on 16.04 VPS Digital Ocean. If you are changing crontabs, make sure to run
sudo service cron restart
On CentOS (my version is 6.5) when editing crontab you must close the editor to reflect your changes in CRON.
crontab -e
After that command You can see that new entry appears in /var/log/cron
Sep 24 10:44:26 ***** crontab[17216]: (*****) BEGIN EDIT (*****)
But only saving crontab editor after making some changes does not work. You must leave the editor to reflect changes in cron. After exiting new entry appears in the log:
Sep 24 10:47:58 ***** crontab[17216]: (*****) END EDIT (*****)
From this point changes you made are visible to CRON.
Try this out: sudo cron reload
It works for me on ubuntu 12.10
On CentOS with cPanel sudo /etc/init.d/crond reload does the trick.
On CentOS7: sudo systemctl start crond.service
Source: Stackoverflow.com