[pgpool-general: 3048] failover issue

[John Scalia]

By my understanding, when a change is made in the recovery.conf file, then it is necessary to restart postgresql. So, with 2 different standby servers and the failure of the 
primary, the first standby gets promoted to master and the second standby must have the primary_conninfo changed to point to the new master. From what I've found online, this 
change will not be read in with only a reload.

But, as the failover_command is run with the postgres userid, you cannot, on Linux, use a "service postgresql-9.3 restart" as that requires root, but could I use pg_ctl to force a 
reload without becoming root? If so, what would the pg_ctl command look like?
--
Jay