AI Cron Expression Generator

Platform-Specific Cron Expressions

Linux/Unix Cron (Standard 5-field)

On Linux and Unix, cron uses exactly five fields: minute, hour, day of month, month, day of week. Example: 0 9 * * 1-5 runs at 9:00 AM every weekday. Edit with crontab -e.

Quartz Cron Expression (6-field)

Quartz (used in Java and Spring) adds a seconds field at the beginning, so there are six fields: second, minute, hour, day of month, month, day of week. Use ? for "no specific value" in either day-of-month or day-of-week. Example: 0 0 9 * * ? means every day at 9:00 AM (0 seconds, 9th hour).

Spring Cron Expression

Spring's @Scheduled annotation uses the same 6-field format as Quartz:

@Scheduled(cron = "0 0 9 * * ?")  // Every day at 9am
public void runDailyReport() {
    // ...
}

Kubernetes CronJob

Kubernetes uses standard 5-field cron in spec.schedule. You can set spec.timeZone (e.g. America/New_York) for the schedule.

spec:
  schedule: "0 9 * * 1-5"
  timeZone: "UTC"
  jobTemplate:
    spec:
      template:
        spec:
          containers:
          - name: report
            image: myjob:latest

AWS EventBridge Cron Expression

AWS EventBridge uses a different format: cron(minutes hours day-of-month month day-of-week year). There are six fields, and day of week uses 1–7 (1=Sunday, 7=Saturday), unlike Unix (0–6). Example: cron(0 9 * * ? *) runs every day at 9:00 AM UTC. Use ? for "any" in day-of-month or day-of-week.

Common Cron Job Use Cases

Daily Database Backup at 2am

#!/bin/bash
# Crontab: 0 2 * * * /path/to/backup.sh
mysqldump -u user -p dbname | gzip > /backups/db-$(date +\%Y\%m\%d).sql.gz
curl -X POST "https://your-ping-url/ping/YOUR_JOB_KEY/end" -d "status=success"

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Weekly Report Every Monday at 9am

#!/bin/bash
# Crontab: 0 9 * * 1 /path/to/weekly-report.sh
/path/to/generate-report.sh
curl -X POST "https://your-ping-url/ping/YOUR_JOB_KEY/end" -d "status=success"

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Hourly Data Sync

#!/bin/bash
# Crontab: 0 * * * * /path/to/sync.sh
/path/to/sync-script.sh || exit 1
curl -X POST "https://your-ping-url/ping/YOUR_JOB_KEY/end" -d "status=success"

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Monthly Cleanup on 1st of Month

#!/bin/bash
# Crontab: 0 0 1 * * /path/to/cleanup.sh
find /tmp -type f -mtime +30 -delete
curl -X POST "https://your-ping-url/ping/YOUR_JOB_KEY/end" -d "status=success"

Add CronBeats monitoring to know if this job ever fails silently.