What "*/5 * * * *" actually means, explained in plain English.
A cron expression schedules a recurring job using five fields — minute, hour, day of month, month, and day of week — each of which can be a specific value, a wildcard (*), a range (9-17), a step (*/15), or a comma-separated list.
This tool parses common cron patterns and describes them in plain English, so you can sanity-check a schedule before deploying it — the difference between "every 15 minutes" and "at minute 15" is a single character that is easy to get wrong under deadline pressure.
It covers the standard patterns you will see in most deployment configs (wildcards, steps, ranges, weekday numbers). Highly nested or vendor-specific extensions (like @daily shortcuts, or six-field expressions with seconds) are not covered by this simplified parser.
Worked example: "0 9 * * 1-5" reads field by field as minute=0, hour=9, day-of-month=* (any), month=* (any), day-of-week=1-5 (Monday through Friday), meaning "runs at 09:00 on weekdays." Change just the minute field to "*/15" instead of "0" and the meaning shifts completely, to "every 15 minutes" — which is the exact single-character difference the explanation above warns about: "15 * * * *" (a specific value) runs once an hour, at minute 15, while "*/15 * * * *" (a step) runs four times an hour, every 15 minutes.
In order: minute (0-59), hour (0-23), day of month (1-31), month (1-12), and day of week (0-6, where 0 is Sunday).
A step value — "every 15 units" starting from the field’s minimum. In the minute field, */15 means minute 0, 15, 30, and 45.
Not in this version — it parses standard five-field numeric cron expressions only.