cron expression · plain english
Cron every Friday at 5 PM
Fires at 17:00 every Friday — end-of-work-week trigger. Used for weekly summaries, deploy freeze announcements, and Friday-evening cleanup jobs.
beginner
POSIX / Jenkins / Quartz / AWS
0 17 * * 5
cron every friday at 5 pm.
Next 5 fire times
Computed live in your local timezone. The cron expression itself is timezone-agnostic — these times reflect your browser clock.
Cross-system syntax variants
Same intent, different schedulers. Use this table when migrating between systems.
| System | Expression | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Standard cron (POSIX) | 0 17 * * 5 | day-of-week 5 = Friday on POSIX |
| Cron (named) | 0 17 * * FRI | POSIX cron supports FRI — readable |
| Jenkins | H 17 * * FRI | H 17 vs H/5 stagger |
| Quartz (Java) | 0 0 17 ? * FRI | ? for day-of-month when DOW is specified |
| systemd timer | OnCalendar=Fri 17:00 | fires at 17:00:00 |
| AWS EventBridge | cron(0 17 ? * FRI *) | AWS Quartz-flavor |
Common pitfalls
- 5 PM in cron's local TZ. For globally-distributed teams, choose a single anchor TZ (UTC) and convert per recipient.
- Friday holiday → cron still fires unless your code checks. For US: skip Memorial Day Friday, July 4 Friday, Black Friday, etc.
- If the job is communication (Slack, email), 17:00 Friday timing matters: 16:30 might catch people before they leave; 17:30 catches dead inbox until Monday.
Use cases
- Weekly metrics digest
- Deploy freeze announcement
- Code review queue summary
- Friday evening cleanup tasks
Translate any cron expression
cronwtf takes any cron string and returns plain-English description plus the next 5 fire times in your timezone. Standard 5-field, Jenkins H, Quartz 6-field — all supported.
Open cronwtf
Related cron schedules
cron every 15 min during business hours · cron every sunday at 2 am (weekly maintenance) · cron: every 2 hours · cron: every weekday (mon-fri) at 9 am