What cron format does this tool accept?

It accepts the standard 5-field Vixie/Linux crontab format: minute, hour, day-of-month, month, and day-of-week. It also understands ranges (1-5), lists (0,6), steps (*/15), month and weekday names (JAN, MON), and the @hourly, @daily, @weekly, @monthly and @yearly macros.

How are the next run times calculated?

The tool simulates the calendar minute by minute starting from now, testing each minute against your expression until it finds the requested number of matches. Everything is computed locally using your device clock, so the times reflect your own local time zone with no server involved.

Why does day-of-month and day-of-week behave oddly together?

Classic cron uses an OR rule: when both the day-of-month and the day-of-week fields are restricted (neither is a wildcard), the job runs whenever either one matches, not both. The tool flags this case explicitly so the schedule is not misread.

What does an asterisk mean in a cron field?

An asterisk (*) means every value for that field. For example, an asterisk in the hour field means every hour, and an asterisk in the month field means every month. A field is only restricted when it contains a specific value, range, list, or step.

What is the difference between */15 and 15 in the minute field?

15 means exactly minute 15 past the hour (one run per hour). */15 means every 15 minutes — that is minutes 0, 15, 30 and 45 — so four runs per hour. The step form is a common source of confusion that this translator makes explicit.

Is my cron expression sent anywhere?

No. Parsing, the plain-English description, and the next-run computation all happen entirely in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, logged, or stored on any server. Recent expressions are kept only in your own browser via local storage.

Crontab to Human — Gera Tools

Crontab to Human turns a cryptic cron expression into a clear sentence you can actually read, then shows you exactly when it will run next. Paste something like 30 9 * * 1-5 and you immediately learn it means “runs at 09:30, on weekdays (Monday–Friday)” — along with the next eight fire times in your own local time zone. It is built for anyone who maintains scheduled jobs: sysadmins reviewing a crontab, developers writing CI pipelines, data engineers checking ETL windows, or anyone who inherited a server and needs to know what those five mysterious numbers actually do before changing them.

How it works

A standard cron line has five space-separated fields: minute, hour, day-of-month, month, and day-of-week. Each field can be a single value, a range like 1-5, a list like 0,6, a step like */15, an asterisk meaning any, or names such as MON and JAN. This tool fully expands every field into the exact set of values it matches, then builds a human sentence from those sets — collapsing common patterns (every 15 minutes, weekdays, the weekend, the 1st of the month) into natural phrasing rather than dumping raw numbers at you.

To find the next run times it does not guess: it walks the calendar forward one minute at a time from the current moment and tests each candidate minute against the parsed expression, collecting matches until it has the number you asked for. That brute-force simulation is slower than a closed-form solver but it is dead simple to reason about and it handles every edge case correctly, including the classic cron quirk where a restricted day-of-month and a restricted day-of-week are combined with OR rather than AND. Macros such as @daily and @weekly are expanded to their five-field equivalents before parsing.

Example

Take 0 22 * * 0,6. The tool reads the minute as 0, the hour as 22, day-of-month and month as any, and day-of-week as 0,6 (Sunday and Saturday). It reports: “Runs at 22:00, at the weekend (Saturday and Sunday).” The next-run list then shows the coming Saturday and Sunday at 10:00 pm, each labelled with a relative time such as in 2d 4h, and estimates the frequency at roughly two runs per week.

Expression	Plain English
`/15 * * *`	Runs every 15 minutes
`0 * * * *`	Runs at minute 0 of every hour
`30 9 * * 1-5`	Runs at 09:30, on weekdays (Monday–Friday)
`0 0 1 * *`	Runs at 00:00, on the 1st of the month
`0 9,17 * * *`	Runs at 09:00 and 17:00, every day

Every figure is produced in your browser — your expression is never uploaded or stored on a server.