Cron expression explainer

Paste a crontab schedule to see what it means in plain English and when it runs next. Five fields: minute, hour, day of month, month, day of week. @daily-style shortcuts work too.

Cron expression Time zone Explain

Examples

• */5 * * * *: Every 5 minutes.
• 0 3 * * *: At 03:00, every day.
• 30 2 * * 1-5: At 02:30, on Monday through Friday.
• 0 9 1 * *: At 09:00, on day 1 of the month.
• 0 */6 * * *: At minute 0, every 6 hours.
• 15 4 * * 0: At 04:15, on Sunday.

Gotchas: in a crontab, a bare % means newline (write \%); cron uses the server's time zone unless CRON_TZ is set; when both day-of-month and day-of-week are restricted, a run happens on either. More in Cron job not running? A checklist.