FAQ
How do I run something every 5 minutes?
Put a step of 5 in the minute field and keep the other four fields as asterisks. The presets fill this in for you.
How do I schedule a daily 2am job?
Minute 0 and hour 2 with the remaining fields as asterisks, meaning 02:00 every day.
How do I verify an expression?
Check the next five run times the tool lists. That is the most direct confirmation, more reliable than reading the spec.
About this tool
The expression is the standard five fields (minute, hour, day of month, month, day of week) and accepts only digits plus * (any), / (step), - (range) and , (list). Letter-based forms such as MON-FRI, Quartz's ? L W, and macros like @daily are not accepted — they belong to different cron dialects.
When both day-of-month and day-of-week are restricted, the standard Vixie cron OR rule applies: 0 0 1 * 1 means "the 1st or every Monday", not "the 1st that is also a Monday". Implementations disagree on this point, so confirm which semantics the target machine uses before writing an ops script.
"Next runs" is computed by scanning forward minute by minute, with a two-year search window, and it uses your browser's local time zone, not the server's. If the two differ, convert the shown times by the offset — a mismatched time zone is the most common reason a schedule fires at the wrong hour. Expressions that may not fire at all within two years, such as 0 0 29 2 * (leap day), report that no next run was found.
The plain-language description is assembled from fixed rules: on the hour, every N minutes, daily/weekly/monthly and similar common shapes produce a readable sentence, while anything else falls back to listing each field. It is an explainer, not a translator — do not expect a complex expression to be rewritten as one natural sentence.