Build cron expressions visually. Select your schedule and get the cron expression instantly with a plain English explanation.
A cron expression is a string of five fields separated by spaces that defines a schedule for running tasks automatically. Cron is a time-based job scheduler in Unix-like systems. It runs commands or scripts at specified times and intervals without any manual intervention.
The five fields are minute, hour, day of month, month, and day of week. Each field can be a specific value, a range, a list, or an asterisk which means every possible value. This gives you fine-grained control over when your tasks run.
The asterisk (*) means every value. A comma separates multiple values like 1,3,5. A hyphen defines a range like 1-5. A slash defines a step like */5 meaning every 5 units.
Both 0 and 7 represent Sunday in most cron implementations. Monday is 1, Tuesday is 2, through to Saturday which is 6.
Standard cron only supports minute-level precision. To run a task more frequently than once per minute you need to use a different scheduling tool or run the cron job every minute and handle sub-minute scheduling in your script.