cron expression · plain english
Cron every Sunday at 2 AM
Fires at 02:00 every Sunday — quiet weekend hour, typical for weekly maintenance. 52 fires per year, predictable timing.
beginner
POSIX / Jenkins / Quartz / AWS
0 2 * * 0
cron every sunday at 2 am.
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 2 * * 0 | DOW 0 = Sunday on POSIX cron |
| Cron (named) | 0 2 * * SUN | named day — clearer |
| Cron (shortcut) | @weekly | = 0 0 * * 0 (midnight Sunday) — different time but weekly cadence |
| Jenkins | H 2 * * SUN | minute hash |
| Quartz (Java) | 0 0 2 ? * SUN | Quartz uses 1=SUN; named is safer |
| systemd timer | OnCalendar=Sun 02:00 | exact equivalent |
| AWS EventBridge | cron(0 2 ? * SUN *) | Quartz-flavor |
Common pitfalls
- DOW 0 vs 7 for Sunday: POSIX cron accepts both, but 0 is universal. Quartz uses 1=SUN. Use named days for portability.
- DST handover happens Sunday morning in US/EU. Fall-back: 02:00 fires TWICE (clocks roll back from 02:59→02:00). Spring-forward: 02:00 is SKIPPED (clocks jump 01:59→03:00).
- If your weekly job is critical and runs in a DST-affected TZ, run it in UTC OR move the fire time to 04:00+ to avoid the DST handover window.
Use cases
- Weekly database vacuum / reindex
- Weekly full backup
- Weekly metric rollup for reporting
- Stale data purge
- Weekly summary email
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 5 minutes · cron every 6 hours (4×/day) · cron weekends only (saturday + sunday) · cron every year on january 1st