Printable Cron Expressions Cheat Sheet

Free printable cron cheat sheet at exact scale — everything you need to read and write crontab schedules on one page: the five time fields and their ranges, the special characters (*, ,, -, /), dozens of ready-made examples from “every minute” to “quarterly”, the @daily-style macros, crontab management commands and the gotchas that trip people up.

A cron expression is five fields — minute, hour, day-of-month, month and day-of-week — that together describe when a job runs. This sheet lays out each field with its valid range, then shows how the special characters combine: * for every value, a comma for a list, a hyphen for a range, and a slash for steps like */15 (every fifteen).

The examples are grouped the way you actually think about schedules — every N minutes or hours, daily and nightly, weekly, and monthly or yearly — followed by the shortcut macros (@reboot, @hourly, @daily, @weekly, @monthly, @yearly) and a wide panel of real-world gotchas: the day-of-month / day-of-week OR rule, 5- vs 6- vs 7-field flavours (classic Unix vs Quartz/Spring with seconds and year), Sunday being both 0 and 7, timezone and daylight-saving surprises, and why cron jobs need full paths.