Cron example
Cron Every 6 Hours
Four runs a day, evenly spaced: midnight, 6 AM, noon and 6 PM. Six divides twenty-four cleanly, so the gaps are identical and the times are the same every day. It is the standard cadence for jobs that are too expensive to run hourly but must not be allowed to go a full day stale.
By NaveenKumar T · Updated · 5-field crontab expression
What each field means
| Field | Value | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Minute | 0 | Minute 0 |
| Hour | */6 | Every 6 hours, starting at hour 0 |
| Day of month | * | Every day |
| Month | * | Every month |
| Day of week | * | Every day of the week |
Next 5 run times
Computing the next runs in your timezone…
Where four times a day fits
This is backup territory: incremental snapshots, replica verification, offsite copies, index rebuilds, and third-party imports that publish a few times a day. Four runs bound your worst-case data loss to six hours while keeping the load and the cost of each run comfortably out of peak traffic.
It is also the schedule to choose when a job takes tens of minutes. A six-hour window means even a badly degraded run finishes long before the next one starts, so you rarely need a lock file — though adding one costs nothing and removes the question entirely.
Which six hours, and in whose timezone
The four slots fall at 00, 06, 12 and 18 in the daemon's timezone. On a container that is almost always UTC, which means the noon run is midday in London and the small hours in Sydney. If the job produces something a human reads each morning — a digest, a reconciliation report — shift the phase with 0 3-23/6 * * * so the runs land at 03:00, 09:00, 15:00 and 21:00 local, or set CRON_TZ explicitly.
Because the runs are anchored to the clock rather than to each other, DST transitions shorten or lengthen exactly one gap per year on a local-time host. For backup schedules that is harmless. For anything that counts intervals, run in UTC and convert on display.
Adjacent schedules
Double the frequency with a step of 3 (0 */3 * * *, eight runs a day) or with every 2 hours. Halve it with a step of 12, which is the same thing as twice a day at midnight and noon.
If four fixed times a day is right but the specific hours are not, drop the step and write the list you actually want: 0 2,8,14,20 * * * is still every six hours, just phase-shifted by two. Preview any of these in the cron expression generator before committing them.
Build a variant of this schedule with dropdowns and check the next ten runs before you install it.
Open the cron generatorRelated cron examples
Browse every schedule on the cron expression generator, read the cron expression syntax guide for the rules behind the five fields, or the developer tools guides for the longer explanations.