Cron Expression Explainer

Understand a crontab line at a glance. Runs in your browser.

Your files stay with you. Your files never leave your browser. This tool runs on your device: nothing is uploaded to our servers, so there is nothing for us to store or see.

How to use it

  1. Type or paste a 5-field cron expression, or pick an example.
  2. Read the plain-English meaning and the field breakdown.
  3. Check the next run times in your time zone.

Questions people ask

What are the five cron fields?
Minute (0-59), hour (0-23), day of month (1-31), month (1-12 or JAN-DEC) and day of week (0-6 or SUN-SAT, with 0 and 7 both Sunday). A star means every value, */5 means every 5th, 1-5 is a range and 1,15 is a list.
What happens when both day fields are set?
In standard cron the job runs when either the day of month or the day of week matches, not both.
Does it support seconds or Quartz and AWS syntax?
No, only the standard 5 fields (plus @daily, @hourly and similar shortcuts). Quartz, Spring and AWS EventBridge add fields or use ? and L in ways that differ.
Which time zone do the run times use?
Your choice: India (IST), UTC or your device zone. Remember that servers usually run cron in UTC unless configured otherwise.

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