💻 WEB & DEVELOPER

Cron to English Translator

Q: What does an asterisk (*) mean in cron?

An asterisk means every or any value for that field. For example, an asterisk in the hour field means the job can run during any hour.

Q: Can cron expressions include seconds?

Standard POSIX cron does not support a seconds field, having exactly five fields. Some tools such as Quartz scheduler support an extended format that adds seconds and/or a year field.

Paste a cron expression, get plain English back. The reverse of building a cron string — for when you're staring at someone else's schedule.

🕐Cron Expression Translator

Enter a standard 5-field cron expression (minute hour day month weekday).

Cron Expression

Please enter a valid 5-field cron expression.

Reading Cron Expressions (Without Squinting)

✓ Field syntax cross-checked against the standard POSIX/Vixie cron specification — last checked June 2026.

A cron expression has five fields, always in the same order: minute, hour, day-of-month, month, day-of-week — a format documented in detail on Wikipedia's cron entry and in the canonical crontab(5) manual page. Each field accepts a wildcard (*, meaning "any"), a specific number, a comma-separated list, a range (a-b), or a step (*/n, meaning "every n units"). The hard part isn't memorizing the order — it's that two unrelated fields (day-of-month and day-of-week) can both be restricted at once, in which case cron treats them as an OR, not an AND, which trips up almost everyone the first time they see it. The official manual page puts it plainly: a job runs when minute, hour, and month all match, and at least one of the two day fields matches — not both.

Cron has barely changed since its earliest Unix implementations in the late 1970s, which is part of why it's so widely supported — virtually every scheduler, from a bare Linux server to GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, and AWS EventBridge, accepts the same five-field core syntax, sometimes with small platform-specific extensions layered on top (AWS EventBridge, for instance, numbers days of the week 1-7 instead of 0-6). That stability is exactly why being able to read an unfamiliar cron string at a glance — rather than mentally simulating it field by field — saves real time when you're debugging someone else's deploy schedule or inherited infrastructure.

Field Reference

Field	Allowed values	Example
Minute	0-59	30 = at minute 30
Hour	0-23	14 = 2pm
Day of month	1-31	1 = the 1st
Month	1-12 or JAN-DEC	1 = January
Day of week	0-6 or SUN-SAT (0=Sunday)	1-5 = Mon-Fri

← Swipe to see all columns

Worked Example

0 9 * * 1-5

Minute: 0
Hour: 9
Day of month: * (any)
Month: * (any)
Day of week: 1-5 (Monday through Friday)

Reads as: "At 09:00, Monday through Friday" — a classic weekday business-hours trigger.

If you're building a schedule rather than decoding one, our Cron Expression Generator works in the opposite direction — pick your schedule visually and it writes the cron string for you. Once your job is scheduled, the Unix Timestamp Converter is handy for checking exactly when a run actually fired against your logs. If you're setting this up directly on a hosting control panel rather than a raw server, Hostinger's own cron job guide covers the panel-specific steps.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does an asterisk (*) mean in cron?+

An asterisk means "every" or "any value" for that field — for example, * in the hour field means the job can run during any hour.

What does */5 mean?+

The slash denotes a step value. */5 in the minute field means "every 5 minutes" — starting from the field's minimum value and repeating at that interval.

What happens if both day-of-month and day-of-week are set?+

Cron treats them as an OR, not an AND. The job runs if either condition is met, which can be surprising if you expected both to need to match simultaneously.

Does day-of-week start at 0 or 1?+

Standard cron uses 0 for Sunday through 6 for Saturday. Some systems also accept 7 as an alternative for Sunday, so check your specific scheduler's documentation if a job seems to run on the wrong day.

Can cron expressions include seconds?+

Standard POSIX cron does not support a seconds field — it has exactly five fields. Some tools, such as Quartz scheduler or certain cloud cron services, support an extended six or seven-field format that adds seconds and/or a year field.