SimpleFinance/chef-wal-e — pull request #6 by jakedavis (2013-07-10 21:08:46+00:00)
Title: Cron automatically detects cronfile changes

Cron does not need to be reloaded to pick up config changes. Per http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/CGI/man-cgi?cron+8 :

```
Cron also searches for /etc/crontab and the files in the /etc/cron.d directory, which are in a different format

Additionally, cron checks each minute to see if its spool directory's modtime (or the modtime on /etc/crontab) has changed, and if it has, cron will then	examine the modtime on all crontabs and reload those which have changed. Thus cron need not be restarted whenever a crontab file is modified.
```

I don't see this on that manpage but I do on an Ubuntu 12.04 instance:
`Additionally, cron reads the files in /etc/cron.d: it treats the files in /etc/cron.d as in the same way as the /etc/crontab file`

Thus, a reload is not necessary. The cron daemon is intelligent enough to figure it out.