L, W, ?, #) most documentation glosses over.*/5 * * * * packs five independent fields. The decoder unpacks them so you can read your schedule the way you read a sentence — left to right, no flicking between docs.View future cron matches in a calendar
Showing next 1000 cron schedules
The decoder recognises the major extended cron modifiers:
? — “no specific value”. Used in Quartz / AWS to resolve the day-of-month vs day-of-week conflict.L — “last”. 0 0 L * * is last day of the month; see the last-day-of-month guide for the full pattern.W — “weekday nearest”. Quartz only.# — “Nth weekday of the month”. 2#1 is the first Monday.0 12 * * * — At 12:00 every day.0 0 ? * MON-FRI — At 00:00 every weekday (Quartz / AWS).0 0 LW * ? — At 00:00 on the last weekday of the month (Quartz).0 30 9 ? * 2#3 — At 09:30 on the third Monday of every month.0 0 1 * * — At 00:00 on the 1st of every month.Paste the cron string into the editor above. The decoder shows what each field means in plain English, plots the next 30+ runs on a calendar, and validates the syntax. No installation, no account, no expression leaves your tab.
The decoder breaks the expression down field by field — minute, hour, day-of-month, month, day-of-week (and seconds + year for extended cron). For each field it tells you the value, the meaning ('every value', 'every 5 minutes', 'on day 15'), and the supported range. Modifiers like `L`, `W`, `?`, `#` are also explained.
Yes. Toggle the extended cron switch in the top bar to enable seconds and year fields plus the `L`, `W`, `?`, `#` modifiers used by AWS EventBridge, Quartz Scheduler and other extended dialects. The decoder accepts 5-, 6-, and 7-field expressions and tells you which dialect a given expression matches.
That's the whole point. The decoder is read-only — it never runs your command, never sends your expression anywhere, and works entirely client-side after the page loads. Safe to paste production cron strings.
Decoding takes a cron string and explains it. Writing (or building) goes the other way — you describe the schedule in your head and compose the cron string. Use the cron builder for the latter, or the cron tester to validate as you write.
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Schedule
“every 5 minutes”
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