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About Cron Expression Explainer (5-field) Online
This tool parses a cron expression (e.g. "0 9 * * 1-5") and explains in plain English what it means and when it will fire. It shows the next several execution times so you can verify the schedule matches your intent before deploying it.
Cron is the standard scheduling language on Unix-like systems, used in cron jobs, Kubernetes CronJobs, GitHub Actions, AWS EventBridge, and many other systems. The five-field syntax (minute, hour, day-of-month, month, day-of-week) is concise but easy to get wrong.
Use it before committing schedules to production. A misread expression that fires every minute instead of every hour can quickly run up bills or generate millions of spam emails.
How to use this tool
How to explain a cron expression in plain English
Paste the cron expression
"Cron expression" expects the classic five-field Unix syntax: `minute hour day-of-month month day-of-week`. Example: `0 9 * * 1` means 09:00 every Monday.
What's supported
Standard wildcards (`*`), lists (`1,15`), ranges (`9-17`), steps (`*/15`, `0-30/5`), and weekday/month names where the local cron implementation accepts them. Up to 120 characters total.
Press Run
Result returns a human-readable explanation derived from each field — e.g. "At 09:00, on Mondays." The tool does NOT compute next runtimes; for that pair with cron-next-runs-online.
Six-field & dialect caveats
Quartz / non-standard dialects with a seconds or year field, predefined macros (`@hourly`, `@yearly`), or `L`/`W`/`#` extensions are not all handled — the explainer is built around POSIX-ish 5-field cron.