* Cron Expression Reference
Every*
schedule,
decoded.
5,000+ cron expressions. Standard, Quartz, Jenkins, AWS EventBridge. Translated to plain English.
Paste any cron expression to translate it into plain English — or start typing to explore.
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* all 22 topics →Report Generation
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* Cron Expression Reference
What is a cron expression?
A cron expression is a compact string that defines a recurring schedule — when a job should run, and how often. The format originates from the Unix `cron` daemon and uses five space-separated fields representing minute, hour, day-of-month, month, and day-of-week. A `*` in any field means "every value" for that unit: `0 9 * * 1` means "at 9:00 AM every Monday," while `*/15 * * * *` means "every 15 minutes."
Cron is the standard scheduling mechanism for Linux and Unix servers, and its syntax has been adopted by cloud platforms, CI/CD systems, and application schedulers — each with their own dialect extensions. AWS EventBridge adds a mandatory year field and mutually exclusive day constraints. Quartz Scheduler adds a seconds field and special characters for last-day-of-month and nearest-weekday scheduling. Jenkins extends cron with the H symbol for distributed load balancing across jobs.
Reading cron expressions by hand is error-prone — the field order is counterintuitive, and subtle syntax differences between dialects cause silent bugs when the same expression is copied from one platform to another. CronBase translates any cron expression into plain English, shows the next five run times, and documents the implementation differences across all four major dialects so you know exactly what your schedule will do before it runs.