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Date: Fri, 03 Sep 2010 10:37:26 +0100
From: Arthur Chance <freebsd@qeng-ho.org>
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Subject: Re: 8.1: Cron ignoring crontab updates
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On 09/03/10 09:19, perryh@pluto.rain.com wrote:
> Chris Rees<utisoft@gmail.com>  wrote:
>
>> You have to SIGHUP cron, not restart it.
>>
>> # killall -HUP cron
>
> Isn't crontab(1) supposed to do that, without separate intervention?

 From man cron

>      Additionally, cron checks each minute to see if its spool directory's
>      modification time (or the modification time on /etc/crontab) has changed,
>      and if it has, 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.  Note that the crontab(1)
>      command updates the modification time of the spool directory whenever it
>      changes a crontab.

 From the original post crontab seems to be working, so all I can suggest
is to "ls -ld /var/cron/tabs" before and after using crontab -e and see
if the modtime is being changed correctly.