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Cron Expression Explainer

Explain cron expressions in plain English and list the next run times — paste a whole crontab if you like.

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TXTCRONCRONTAB

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Explain cron expressions in plain English and list the next run times — paste a whole crontab if you like.

About Cron Expression Explainer

Paste a cron expression, or a whole crontab, and this tool describes each schedule in plain English and lists the next five run times in your local time zone. It supports names like MON-FRI and JAN, steps like */15, ranges, lists, and macros such as @daily and @hourly.

When it helps

  • Checking that a new crontab line runs when you intend before deploying it.
  • Understanding schedules in GitHub Actions, Kubernetes CronJobs or CI pipelines written by someone else.
  • Auditing a server's crontab to see when each job actually fires.

Tips

  • Standard five-field syntax is expected: minute, hour, day of month, month, day of week. Anything after the fifth field is shown as the command.
  • When both day of month and day of week are restricted, cron runs when either matches, not both. The explanation shows this as OR.
  • Next run times use your browser's time zone. Servers and services like GitHub Actions usually run cron in UTC, so adjust accordingly.
  • Both 0 and 7 mean Sunday in the day-of-week field.

Good to know

Quick answers about cron expression explainer in your browser.

Every 5 units across the whole range. In the minute field, */5 means minutes 0, 5, 10 and so on up to 55.

No. It follows standard Unix cron with five fields. Quartz and Spring expressions with a seconds field, or features like L and #, are not supported.

Yes. There is no sign-up, no watermark and no limit on how many files you process.

No. Files are read and processed locally in your browser, so they never leave your device.

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Part of the Developer Utilities collection.