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Crontab generator

The standard Unix crontab format — minute, hour, day-of-month, month, day-of-week, five fields, no seconds — used by cron, Linux system schedulers and most CI tools. Build it with presets or field-by-field controls, and check it against a plain-English explanation and the next five actual run times before you trust it in production.

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{{ explanation.text }}

Or build it field by field
{{ f.name }}
Next 5 run times
  1. {{ fmt(r) }}

How to use this tool

  1. Pick a preset or set each field

    Minute, hour, day of month, month, weekday — every field has an Every / Specific / Range / Step option.

  2. Read the plain-English explanation

    It updates live and calls out the day-of-month/weekday OR-rule gotcha when both are set.

  3. Check the next 5 run times

    Computed against your expression, so you can confirm the schedule actually does what you meant before shipping it.

Questions people ask

What does * * * * * mean in a crontab?

Five asterisks means every minute, of every hour, of every day — the fields in order are minute, hour, day-of-month, month, and day-of-week, each defaulting to "every" when set to *.

How do I run a cron job every 5 minutes?

*/5 * * * * — the /5 step syntax means "every 5th value starting from the field's minimum". Click the "Every 5 minutes" preset above to see exactly how it is built.

How do I schedule a job for weekdays at 9 AM?

0 9 * * 1-5 — minute 0, hour 9, any day of month, any month, weekday 1 through 5 (Monday through Friday, where cron numbers Sunday as 0).

What happens if both day-of-month and day-of-week are set?

Standard cron runs the job when EITHER field matches, not only when both do — a common gotcha this tool's plain-English explanation calls out explicitly whenever both fields are restricted at the same time.

Does standard crontab support a seconds field?

No — the traditional Unix crontab format has exactly five fields and no seconds resolution. If you need second-level scheduling (common in Java/Spring apps via Quartz), use our separate cron expression generator, which is built for that 6/7-field syntax.

Related tools

Bookmark this page — the tool keeps working offline, and your settings stay in this browser. Built by Dynamb Technologies, who make software for a living.