Cron Generator & Translator

Basic Cron Expression Format

A CRON expression consists of 5 (or 6) fields separated by whitespace, evaluated left to right.
Minute Hour Day of Month Month Day of Week (Some systems may include a Year field at the end or a Seconds field at the beginning, but standard Linux cron uses 5 fields)

• Minute: 0–59
• Hour: 0–23
• Day of Month: 1–31
• Month: 1–12 (or JAN–DEC)
• Day of Week: 0–7 (0 and 7 are Sunday, 1 is Monday; or SUN–SAT)

Special Characters (Metacharacters)

In addition to numeric values, you can use the following special characters to create flexible schedules.

• * (Asterisk): Matches all values. The job runs for every possible value in the field.（If Month is *, runs every month）
• , (Comma): List separator. Specifies multiple values.（If Day of Week is 1,3,5, runs on Mon, Wed, Fri）
• - (Hyphen): Range specifier. Runs for all values within the range.（If Hour is 9-17, runs every hour from 9 AM to 5 PM）
• / (Slash): Step specifier. Runs at every Nth interval.（If Minute is */15, runs every 15 minutes）

Common Practical Examples

• 0 0 * * * : Run daily at midnight (ideal for daily batch jobs)
• 0 12 * * 1-5 : Run at 12:00 PM on weekdays (Mon–Fri)
• */10 * * * * : Run every 10 minutes (ideal for health checks and polling)
• 0 2 1 * * : Run on the 1st of every month at 2:00 AM (e.g., monthly report aggregation)