Cron explainer
Paste a cron expression and read what it actually does, then check that against when it would next fire.
Both together on purpose: a sentence can be misread and five times could be a coincidence, and the two agreeing is what makes them convincing.
*/15 minute* hour* day of month* month* day of week
Every 15 minutes, every day.
The next five runs
In UTC.
Working them out.
Try one of these
Questions
- Is what I paste sent anywhere?
- No. Every tool in this kit runs in the page itself. There is no server here that receives what you paste, and you can check it in your browser's network tab: using a tool produces no request carrying your input at all.
- Which syntax does it understand?
- The standard five fields: minute, hour, day of month, month, day of week. Ranges like 1-5, steps like */15 and 0-30/10, lists like 1,15,30, and names like MON or JAN, in any case. Sunday can be written 0 or 7.
- Why does setting both the day of month and the day of week run more often than I expect?
- Because cron treats them as either, not both. An expression like 0 0 13 * FRI runs on the 13th of every month AND on every Friday. It looks like a bug, every cron implementation shares it, and the explanation says so out loud whenever both fields are set.
- Are @daily and the other shorthands supported?
- No, and deliberately. Half-supporting a syntax is how somebody comes to trust an answer that is wrong. The tool says what @daily is in five fields rather than guessing.
- Why does it say a schedule never runs?
- Because some cannot. The 30th of February is a valid expression that no clock will ever match. Rather than search forever, the tool looks eight years ahead and tells you it found nothing.
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