0 17 * * 5
Cron reads this as: at 17:00, on day-of-week Friday.
Next 5 runs
These times are in your browser's local time zone. Cron itself uses the server's zone, which on most cloud hosts is UTC. If the difference matters here, see time zones & DST.
- Calculating…
When to use this schedule
This runs at the end of the working week, which suits weekly summary emails, timesheet reminders and archiving the week's artefacts. Cron uses 24-hour time, so 5 PM is 17.
What to watch out for
A job that fails on Friday afternoon can go unnoticed until Monday, because nobody is around to see it. If this job matters, give it a failure path that gets attention, such as a non-zero exit that pages someone or a check-in that alerts when it goes missing. For the same reason, avoid deploying changes to a Friday-evening job on a Friday afternoon.
The crontab line
0 17 * * 5 /usr/local/bin/your-job.sh >> /var/log/your-job.log 2>&1Send the output to a log you will read. By default cron mails it, and on a host with no mail transport that mail is silently dropped. See the crontab guide for the surrounding syntax.
Related schedules
| Expression | Schedule |
|---|---|
0 17 * * FRI | Same schedule, using names |
0 17 * * 1-5 | Every weekday at 17:00 |
0 9 * * 1 | Monday morning instead |
Build your own
If this page doesn't cover the schedule you need, compose it field by field in the visual builder, or paste an expression you already have into the explainer for a per-field breakdown. The examples library has sixty schedules in one place, and the guides cover crontab syntax, time zones, troubleshooting and production practices.