Crontab Syntax Cheat Sheet and Ten Everyday Examples

A crontab line has five fields — minute, hour, day of month, month, day of week — and the four symbols * / , - combine to express any schedule. After writing an expression, paste it into our crontab parser tool to translate it into plain text and double-check.

The Format

┌ minute (0-59)
│ ┌ hour (0-23)
│ │ ┌ day of month (1-31)
│ │ │ ┌ month (1-12)
│ │ │ │ ┌ day of week (0-7; both 0 and 7 are Sunday)
* * * * * command

The four symbols: * any value, */n every n, a-b range, a,b list.

Ten Everyday Expressions

Goal	Expression
Every minute	* * * * *
Every 5 minutes	*/5 * * * *
At the top of every hour	0 * * * *
Every day at 2 AM	0 2 * * *
Weekdays at 9 AM	0 9 * * 1-5
Mondays at 3 AM	0 3 * * 1
Midnight on the 1st of each month	0 0 1 * *
Every 10 minutes during working hours	*/10 9-18 * * *
At minutes 0 and 30 of every hour	0,30 * * * *
Midnight on New Year's Day	0 0 1 1 *

Three Classic Pitfalls

1. Day-of-month and day-of-week are OR'd together: 0 0 1 * 1 does not mean "the 1st of the month if it's a Monday" — it runs on the 1st of every month and every Monday.
2. Minimal environment variables: cron's PATH differs from your interactive shell, so use absolute paths for commands in your scripts.
3. % is a special character: in the command, % is treated as a newline — date +\%Y\%m\%d needs the escapes.

Last updated: 2026-08-15