Cron Expression for Every Minute

Cron reads this as: every minute.

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

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

What to watch out for

Sixty invocations an hour means process startup cost dominates for anything with a slow runtime — a Python script with heavy imports can spend more time booting 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 find yourself wanting faster than this, cron is the wrong tool: use a long-running process with its own timer.

The crontab line

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

Redirect 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

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.