I know I am late to the party, but a little trick you can do in order to reload the app from the command line is to go to the web.xml of the application and simply touch it.
cd webapps/<webapp-name>/WEB-INF/
touch web.xml
tomcat reloads the application every time it notices a change on this file, if you simply touch it, you are not actually modifying the file, just the timestamp.