Parse cron expressions into plain English with field validation, step and range support and next five run times to schedule jobs confidently offline.
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Quick answer: Cron Parser — Explain cron expressions Free, no signup, runs in your browser. See below for the interactive tool, 4-step guide and FAQs.
Invalid cron expression.
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Standard five-field cron with minute hour day month weekday, accepting star, steps, ranges and lists. For illustration, 0 0 star star 1 means Mondays at midnight. A five-field string parses within fifty milliseconds, rendering plain English and next five runs for confident scheduling across servers.
It honors cron specification where restricted day-of-month and day-of-week combine with OR rather than AND. For instance, 0 0 1 star 1 fires on the 1st or Mondays, yielding double dates. All evaluation executes inside this tab. No upload occurs. Preview five upcoming runs to confirm intent before saving crontab entries.
Five-field only; at-daily aliases or six-field seconds trigger invalid flags with corrective guidance. For example, use 0 0 star star star for daily midnight rather than nickname. A six-field string highlights surplus segment. Copy corrected five-field into crontab. Time conversions live at /timestamp-converter for epoch cross-checks.
Spring forward skips 2am entirely while fall back repeats it, causing missed or duplicated runs for wall-clock jobs. For example, 0 2 star star star vanishes one March day in many zones. Prefer UTC for critical backups, add idempotency guards, and audit next five runs around transitions to preserve data integrity.
Parsing translates five-field cron into plain English and next five run times for reliable automation. Example 1: 0 0 star star 1 reads At midnight on Monday for weekly reports. Example 2: slash 5 in minute field means every five minutes for health checks. Supports star wildcards, step slashes, ranges like 1 to 5 and lists like 1 comma 15. DevOps schedule backups, analysts trigger extracts and hobbyists automate lights. Immediate translation and run preview demystifies terse syntax, prevents costly misfires, and builds confidence before committing to production crontabs across fleets.
Reference field table: minute 0 to 59 | hour 0 to 23 | day 1 to 31 | month 1 to 12 | weekday 0 to 6 Sunday. Steps like 0 slash 5 mean every five minutes, ranges cover spans, lists pick discrete values. Edge case: day-of-month and weekday both restricted join with OR, so 0 0 1 star 1 runs 1st or Mondays doubling dates. Invalid six-field or nickname forms flag with fix hints. Preview five runs, scrutinize month boundaries, and confirm timezone context because cron uses server local time unless configured for UTC. Observatories auditing daylight transitions and OR-logic edge cases publish matrices that prevent duplicate billing runs across SaaS tenants while updating runbooks quarterly now daily for safety.
Type 0 0 star star 1, read Monday midnight, inspect next five Mondays, copy into crontab for weekly jobs. Second trial: craft 0 9 star star 1 for Monday 9am standup reminders. Limitation: five-field only, seconds unsupported, and daylight transitions skew 2am runs. For epoch translation around scheduling, see the converter at /timestamp-converter for date math. For calendar differences, see the calculator at /date-calculator for interval planning.