Crontab
TimeBuild a cron expression with presets and see a human-readable description.
What this tool helps with
A crontab expression's five fields — minute, hour, day-of-month, month, day-of-week — look simple until you need "every weekday at 9:15" or "the first Sunday of every month." This tool turns an expression into plain English so you can sanity-check what your scheduler will actually do, and it explains each field separately so you can see why. Everything is parsed locally, which matters because production cron expressions sometimes encode business secrets like exact billing or batch windows.
0-59hour
0-23day-month
1-31month
1-12day-week
0-6 (Sun=0)
How to use Crontab
- Open the Crontab page and paste, type, or generate the cron input you want to work with.
- Pick the options you need so the tool can build a cron expression with presets and see a human-readable description
- Copy the crontab result with one click and use it in your next step — terminal, editor, ticket, or anywhere else you need it.
Common uses
- Reach for Crontab when you need to build a cron expression with presets and see a human-readable description during debugging, code review, or content preparation.
- Skip installing a desktop cron app — open this time utility on a shared machine, an iPad, or a colleague's laptop and it just works.
- Bookmark or share the page when you and your team keep coming back to the same cron, crontab, schedule, and describe workflow.
FAQ
Which cron dialect does this support?
Standard Unix cron (five fields). Some schedulers add a seconds field or non-standard tokens like @reboot; those are not parsed. Check your scheduler's docs if you use extensions.
What does the */N syntax mean?
It is a step: run at every Nth value of that field. */15 in the minute slot fires at :00, :15, :30, :45. It works in any field but step is most useful for minutes and hours.
Why don't day-of-month and day-of-week combine the way I expect?
When both are restricted, cron uses OR semantics: the job runs if either matches. "15 9 1 * 1" fires on the 1st of every month AND every Monday, not only when the 1st is a Monday.