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Cron: Every Hour

What "0 * * * *" actually means, explained in plain English.

Format: minute hour day-of-month month day-of-week

About this tool

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.

Frequently asked questions

What do the five fields mean?

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).

What does */15 mean?

A step value — "every 15 units" starting from the field’s minimum. In the minute field, */15 means minute 0, 15, 30, and 45.

Does this support @daily or @hourly shortcuts?

Not in this version — it parses standard five-field numeric cron expressions only.

Other countdown scenarios

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