0 17 * * 5
Cron reads this as: at 17:00, on day-of-week Friday.
Next 5 runs
Computed in your browser's local time zone. Cron itself evaluates against the server's zone, which on most cloud hosts is UTC — see time zones & DST if that distinction matters here.
- Calculating…
When to use this schedule
End of the working week — weekly summary emails, timesheet reminders, archiving the week's artefacts. Cron uses 24-hour time, so 5 PM is 17.
What to watch out for
Friday afternoon is the worst possible time for a job to fail, because nobody is around to notice until Monday. If this job matters, make sure its failure path is loud: a non-zero exit that pages, or a check-in that alerts on absence. Deploying a change to a Friday-evening job on a Friday afternoon is its own kind of mistake.
The crontab line
0 17 * * 5 /usr/local/bin/your-job.sh >> /var/log/your-job.log 2>&1Redirect the output somewhere you will actually read it — by default cron mails it, and on a host with no mail transport that means it is discarded. 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
Need something this page does not cover? 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 collects sixty schedules in one place, and the guides cover crontab syntax, time zones, troubleshooting and production practices.