Crontab Explainer
Translate a crontab expression into human-readable schedule and list the next 10 scheduled runs.
min hour dom month dow (5-field) or sec min hour dom month dow (6-field).
—
—
Quick reference
*— every unit*/5— every 5th,— list (e.g.1,3,5)-— range (e.g.1-5)- Dow: 0/7 = Sun, 1 = Mon, … 6 = Sat
About Crontab Explainer
A crontab expression describes a repeating schedule with five whitespace-separated fields: minute, hour, day of month, month, and day of week, with a sixth field adding seconds in some implementations. Wildcards, lists, ranges, and step values let you express anything from a nightly backup to a quarterly report run. This explainer parses the expression, shows what each field means, and lists the next ten times the job will fire.
Use it when you are troubleshooting scheduled jobs: jobs that never run, run at the wrong time, or run more often than expected are usually explained by a subtle field mistake. Note that cron interprets times in the local timezone of the daemon rather than the user's, and on most systems there is no per-job timezone field without extensions like CRON_TZ. Also remember that shorthands such as @daily, @hourly, or @reboot are convenience strings supported by cronie and Vixie cron, not part of the standard five-field format.