Natural Language → Cron

You need to schedule a job and get stuck translating every weekday at 8:30 into that row of asterisks. Despite the name, this page does not parse a typed sentence: you pick a frequency from a menu, fill in the time, day of month or weekdays, and the five field expression appears ready to paste into your crontab. It is all fixed rules, no AI and no guessing, so the same selections always yield the same line.

The every N minutes option produces something like */7 * * * *, and that is where cron's most common trap hides. The step counts from zero within each hour, so the job fires at 0, 7, 14 and onward to 56, then restarts at 0, leaving a 4 minute gap across the hour boundary. Even spacing only happens with divisors of 60: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20 and 30. Anything else and the last run of the hour sits closer to the next one.

The output has five fields, in Unix crontab format. If your scheduler is Quartz or the Spring scheduler, it expects six fields with seconds in front and will reject this line. The month field is always left as an asterisk, so quarterly schedules are out of reach here. Check the server timezone too, since cron follows the machine clock: 08:30 on a UTC VPS is 05:30 in Brazil. The expression is assembled in your browser.