(Ted Harding) wrote:
Does the following (from 'man cron') give any useful clue? [..snip..]
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. Note that the crontab(1) command updates the modtime of the spool directory whenever it changes a crontab.
It was the modtime of the /var/spool/cron directory I was changing in my script (not the crontabs subdirectory as previously indicated) which I think is what "man cron" is referring to (that's where I got the info too). It didn't occur to me to try changing the mtime of /etc/crontab however; I'll give that a go.