Read a Cron Expression, and See When It Will Fire CRON
A cron line is five terse fields, and one wrong step means a backup that never runs. This reads it back in plain English and shows the actual next run times, so you can trust it.
The expression
┌ minute (0-59) │ ┌ hour (0-23) │ │ ┌ day of month (1-31) │ │ │ ┌ month (1-12 or jan-dec) │ │ │ │ ┌ day of week (0-7, 0 and 7 = Sun) * * * * *
Reading it, and where it runs
The plain-English line and the real next-run dates are two views of the same thing; the dates catch a mistake the words can hide. The times shown are in the zone you pick here — but the machine running your crontab uses its own zone (often UTC), so confirm which, or a job fires an hour or a day off. CRON only reads and calculates; it schedules and runs nothing.