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Cron Expression Parser

Explain a five-field cron expression in plain words and list its next five run times.

NETWORK · IN YOUR BROWSER

Runs in your browser; nothing you type leaves this page. Too long to share as a link.

HISTORY

Your last 5 runs appear here for 7 days, on this device only.

RESULT

Fill in the form and run the tool; the result appears here.

Cron Expression Parser breaks a cron expression down into its minute, hour, day-of-month, month and day-of-week fields, and lists the next five times it will actually run, in your local time and in UTC.

How to read the result

The fields table summarises each part of the expression ("every minute", a month or weekday name, or the value as written for lists, ranges and steps); the next-runs table shows the following five scheduled times computed from the current time, which is the fastest way to confirm a schedule is what you intended before it goes live. Each field takes numbers, lists, ranges and steps (1,15,30, 1-5, */15); names such as MON or JAN and shortcuts such as @daily are not accepted. If no run falls within the next two years, the result says so.

Defender tips

  • Review scheduled jobs for the privilege they run with; a cron job running as root or an over-privileged service account is a common way a minor bug turns into a major one.
  • Guard against overlapping runs (a job that takes longer than its interval) with a lock file or a scheduler that supports it natively, rather than assuming the previous run always finishes first.
  • Keep cron definitions in version control alongside the code they run, not only in a server's crontab, so changes are reviewed and reversible the same way code changes are.

FAQ

Does this support Quartz cron syntax as well as Unix cron?

The parser targets standard five-field Unix cron; Quartz's six or seven-field format (which adds seconds and sometimes year) uses different semantics for day-of-month and day-of-week and is not the same syntax.

What time zone are the next-run times shown in?

In your browser's local time zone, with the same times in UTC alongside; the schedule itself has no time zone, so it runs in whatever zone the system running it is set to.

Why are day-of-month and day-of-week combined with OR, not AND?

That is standard cron behaviour: when both fields are restricted (not *), the job runs if either condition matches, which surprises people expecting both to be required simultaneously.