cronschedule5

Cronschedule5 is a five-field cron-like scheduling standard used to describe recurring tasks in computing environments. It preserves the traditional five-field layout—minute, hour, day of month, month, and day of week—while emphasizing clear, interoperable syntax that aligns with common cron implementations. In practice, cronschedule5 expressions are interpreted by scheduling systems to determine when a given task should run, typically based on the time and date information provided by the host machine.

The syntax of cronschedule5 follows established cron conventions. Each field accepts integers, ranges, lists, and step values. Wildcards such as ‘‘*’’ denote all possible values for a field. Step expressions use the slash notation, for example ‘‘*/15’’ in the minute field to indicate execution every 15 minutes. Ranges are written with a dash (e.g., ‘‘9-17’’ for hours 9 through 17), and lists are separated by commas (e.g., ‘‘1,3,5’’). Month and day-of-week fields may accept named aliases in addition to numeric values (JAN-DEC, SUN-SAT). Time zone handling is implementation-specific, with many environments evaluating expressions in the system's configured time zone.

Usage and behavior: a task described by a cronschedule5 expression is scheduled to run when the time matches the criteria expressed by all five fields. This compatibility-focused design facilitates adoption across diverse systems and libraries that implement cron-like scheduling.

Examples:

- 0 3 * * * runs daily at 03:00.

- */15 * * * * runs every 15 minutes.

- 0 9-17 * * 1-5 runs on weekdays during the 9:00 to 17:59 span, at the top of each hour.

- 0 0 1 1 * runs at midnight on January 1st.

See also: Cron, Cron expression, Time-based job scheduling.