Cron Expression Explainer

About this tool

What Is Cron Expression Explainer? The Cron Expression Explainer decodes 5-field cron expressions and lists the next five scheduled run times. Every field — minute, hour, day of month, month, and day of week — is described in plain language, and special entries such as @daily and @reboot are expanded automatically. How It Works The parser expands every list (,), range (-), step (/), wildcard (*), and numeric month or day name into concrete time sets and validates overflow such as minute 61. Next-run calculation advances minute by minute and keeps only times that match all five fields at once. Worked Example */15 * * * * runs every 15 minutes at minute 0, 15, 30, and 45 of every hour, and 0 9 * * 1-5 runs at 09:00 from Monday to Friday. Common Use Cases verify a cron schedule before deploying it explain legacy or inherited crontab entries tune backup and job timing deliberately Important Notes standard 5-field cron has no seconds or year Unix cron treats day-of-month and day-of-week with OR semantics in some engines — the explainer shows the resolved day set next-run times use your browser's local time zone Related Tools Cron Expression Generator — build cron expressions from a schedule. Timestamp Converter — convert Unix timestamps to dates and back. Time Zone Converter — compare times across time zones. Deadline Calculator — plan and track deadlines. Meeting Planner — find mee