Cron

Cron Expression Cheatsheet

Cron expressions are five fields: minute, hour, day-of-month, month, day-of-week. Each can be a number, range, list, step, or wildcard.

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Common schedules

0 * * * * — every hour on the hour. */15 * * * * — every 15 minutes. 0 4 * * * — daily at 4 AM. 0 0 * * 0 — weekly on Sunday midnight. 0 0 1 * * — monthly on the 1st. 30 9 * * 1-5 — 9:30 AM Mon-Fri.

Wildcards and ranges

* matches anything. 1-5 is a range (e.g. Mon-Fri). 1 3 5 is a list (Mon Wed Fri). */15 means 'every 15' (0 15 30 45).

Special values

@hourly = 0 * * * *. @daily = 0 0 * * *. @weekly = 0 0 * * 0. @monthly = 0 0 1 * *. @yearly = 0 0 1 1 *. Not all cron implementations support these — Linux cron does BSD doesn't.

Pitfalls

Day-of-month AND day-of-week both use OR semantics in standard cron — '0 0 1 * 1' fires both on the 1st AND on every Monday. To run on the 1st Monday only use '0 0 1-7 * 1'. Time zones: cron uses the system's TZ — set TZ=UTC at the top of crontab to avoid surprises.

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