When does this actually run?
Paste a cron line to read it as a sentence and see the next times it fires. Worth ten seconds before you deploy something you meant to run nightly.
Questions people actually ask
- What order do the fields go in?
- Minute, hour, day of the month, month, day of the week. The one people get wrong is the first two — "3 0" is not three in the morning, it is one minute past midnight every day, twenty minutes short of what was meant.
- Why does my job run more often than I expect?
- Usually because both the day of the month and the day of the week are set. Cron treats those as *or*, not *and*, so "1 * * * 1" runs on the first of the month and on every Monday.
- Which time zone are the next runs in?
- Whichever you pick. It defaults to your own, but a server almost always runs on UTC, so if you are checking what will happen in production, set it to that.
- Does it handle @daily and ranges?
- Yes. The shorthands like @daily and @hourly are understood, along with ranges, lists and steps — "*/15", "1-5" and "mon,wed,fri" all read correctly.