Cron Expression Explainer
Paste a five-field cron expression and get a plain-English schedule explanation.
Read cron without guessing
Cron syntax is compact but genuinely easy to misread, and a wrong field can mean a job that runs every minute instead of once a day — or never fires at all. This explainer breaks a standard five-field expression into its minute, hour, day-of-month, month, and day-of-week pieces, then turns the pattern into a plain-English description so you can confirm at a glance that it does what you intended.
It also offers common presets — weekday mornings, daily midnight, every few minutes, monthly — as one-click starting points you can tweak. Use it to sanity-check a schedule before you commit it to a crontab, a server, a CI pipeline, or an automation dashboard, where a silent mistake can be slow and costly to notice.
Private and instant
The expression is parsed entirely in your browser as you type — nothing is scheduled, fetched, or uploaded — so it is purely a safe, offline reference for understanding cron.
Frequently Asked Questions
What cron format does this explain?
It explains standard five-field cron expressions: minute, hour, day of month, month, and day of week.
Does it schedule anything?
No. It only explains and previews the expression locally.
Are all cron dialects supported?
No. It is a simple explainer for common Unix-style cron syntax.
Is anything uploaded?
No. The expression is parsed in your browser.
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