Field Editor

How to use the Field Editor

A standard cron expression has five fields: minute, hour, day of month, month and day of week. Most mistakes come from editing one field without noticing how it combines with the others, for example setting an hour but leaving the minute as *, which runs the job 60 times in that hour.

The Field Editor lets you change one field at a time and shows the plain-English meaning of the whole expression after every change, so you can see the effect before you copy it into a crontab or scheduler.

Step by step

1. The editor opens with an example expression. Change its fields one by one to build the schedule you need.
2. Click the field you want to change: minute, hour, day of month, month or day of week.
3. Pick a preset or type a custom value such as */5 (every fifth), 1-5 (a range) or 0,15,30 (a list), then apply it.
4. Read the live translation. If it does not say what you meant, adjust the field again before copying the result.

Examples

0 9 * * 1-5

At 09:00, Monday through Friday

Change the hour field from 9 to 6 to move the run to 06:00 without touching the weekday range.

*/15 * * * *

Every 15 minutes every day

Set the day-of-week field to 1-5 to keep the 15-minute interval but skip weekends.

Things to watch for

• In standard cron, day of week runs 0-7, where both 0 and 7 mean Sunday.
• If you set both day of month and day of week, most cron implementations run the job when either one matches, not only when both do.
• Cron uses the server time zone. Check it before choosing an hour, especially for jobs between 01:00 and 03:00 that daylight saving changes can skip or repeat.