How to read the crontab

Each entry in a crontab file consists of six fields, specified in the following order

minute hour day month weekday command

The fields are separated by blank spaces or tabs.

 

Field	Description
• minute	0 through 59
• hour	0 through 23
• day of month	1 through 31
• month	1 through 12
• day of week	0 through 7 (0 or 7 is Sunday, 1 is Monday, etc., or use names)
• command	This is the complete sequence of commands to be executed for the job

When an asterisk (*) is displayed, it means all possible values for the field. For example, an asterisk in the hour time field would be equivalent to “every hour”

How to read the crontab