Check cron syntax with crontab guru

I don't use cron jobs regularly enough to know the syntax by heart.

As a (primarily) Python programmer I'm used to thinking of time in terms of datetime objects and conversions. But instead of being geared towards a linear progression of time, cron is made for scheduling repeated tasks at regular intervals.

Cron job format consists of a string of five characters in a line separated by spaces, like so: * * * * *, with the values corresponding to minute, hour, day of the month, month, and day of the week.

The * character means "each one of these units" so the above example means "do this every minute of every day."

I recently found the site crontab guru, an editor/validator for cron schedule expressions, which makes it easier to confirm that a cron job is doing what you think it does. Type in an expression in cron format, and it will describe the output of that expression in human language with a sample of the times that the job will run:

You don't really need to use a tool like this, but for any projects that require task scheduling, I'd rather double check than risk making an error that could cause a key process to misfire.