How do I restart the cron service on OSX? ProductName:    Mac OS X
ProductVersion: 10.11.6
BuildVersion:   15G31

$ sudo cron restart
cron: cron already running, pid: 257`


None of the answers in here https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10193788/restarting-cron-after-changing-crontab-file seem to apply to OSX. Well the one above is the closest one but it appears to be just telling me that cron is running so I don't have to worry about restarting it. Which isn't the point of restarting something. 

How do I stop and restart the cron service on a Mac?
The cron daemon is managed with launchctl.

If you insist on restarting it, you have to unload and load the respective launch daemon:

sudo launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.vix.cron.plist
sudo launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.vix.cron.plist


But: adding or removing arbitrary crontabs shouldn't require a reload of the daemon to enable or disable them.

The above launch daemon plist contains a Watch Directory directive which detects (crontab) file creation and deletion or modified dates and "instructs" cron respectively.