Cron Expression for Every Minute

Cron reads this as: every minute.

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.

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When to use this schedule

This is the fastest a standard cron daemon can run. It fits a queue drainer, a heartbeat or a poller that has to react within a minute. It is also the expression most likely to be a mistake: an unset minute field is the most common cron typo, and it turns an intended hourly job into one that runs sixty times an hour.

What to watch out for

At sixty invocations an hour, process startup cost dominates for anything with a slow runtime. A Python script with heavy imports can spend more time starting up than working. At this frequency overlap is close to inevitable, so wrap the command in flock -n unless the job reliably finishes in a few seconds. If you need a shorter interval than this, cron is the wrong tool. Use a long-running process with its own timer instead.

The crontab line

* * * * * /usr/local/bin/your-job.sh >> /var/log/your-job.log 2>&1

Send 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

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.