Translate a cron schedule into plain English and see the next upcoming run times.
A cron expression is a string of 5 space-separated fields that define a recurring schedule: minute hour day-of-month month day-of-week. Each field accepts a specific value, a wildcard (* = every), a range (1-5), a list (1,3,5), or a step value (*/15 = every 15 units).
Examples: 0 9 * * 1-5 = 9:00 AM on weekdays. */15 * * * * = every 15 minutes. 0 0 1 * * = midnight on the 1st of every month. 0 */2 * * * = every 2 hours. Day-of-week: 0 or 7 = Sunday, 1 = Monday, …, 6 = Saturday. Cron runs in the server's local timezone unless configured otherwise — always set timezone explicitly in production systems using CRON_TZ or system-level settings. Some platforms use 6-field cron (adding seconds as the first field) or 7-field (adding year at the end).
A cron expression is a 5-field string that defines a recurring task schedule on Unix-like systems: minute (0–59), hour (0–23), day of month (1–31), month (1–12), day of week (0–7, where 0 and 7 are Sunday). Special characters allow ranges, lists, and intervals.
An asterisk (*) in a cron field means 'every valid value for this field'. For example, * in the minute field means every minute, * in the hour field means every hour. '*/5' in the minute field means every 5 minutes.
Use the expression: */5 * * * * — this runs the job at minutes 0, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50, and 55 of every hour, every day.
Yes, by default cron uses the server's local timezone. To set a specific timezone, use CRON_TZ=America/New_York in a crontab or configure it in your scheduler (e.g., Kubernetes CronJob has a timeZone field). Always set timezone explicitly in production to avoid daylight saving surprises.