Is */5 the same as 0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55?

Yes, for the minute field the two are exactly equivalent. The step form is just shorter and easier to change later. Cron expands */5 to the full list internally before matching.

Does */5 mean five minutes after the previous run completed?

No. Cron schedules against the wall clock, so runs land at fixed minutes regardless of how long each one takes. If a run takes six minutes, the next one still starts on schedule and overlaps it, so add a lock if the job is not safe to run concurrently.

How do I run every 5 minutes but only at night?

Constrain the hour field. */5 0-5 * * * fires every five minutes between 00:00 and 05:55 local time and stays silent the rest of the day. Ranges in the hour field are inclusive on both ends.

Cron: Every 5 Minutes

The cron expression for "every 5 minutes", what each field means, and the next run times on your clock.

What is the cron expression for every 5 minutes?

Use */5 * * * *. The minute field steps by 5, matching minutes 0, 5, 10, and so on through 55, while the four remaining wildcards cover every hour and day. The job fires 288 times per day, a standard cadence for uptime checks and metric scrapes.

*/5 * * * *

Every 5 minutes

Next 5 runs (your timezone)

Open the full Cron Expression Generator →

What the step operator actually does

The slash in */5 is the step operator: start from the lowest value the field allows, then take every fifth value. For the minute field that expands to 0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55. It is purely wall-clock arithmetic. The schedule does not mean five minutes after the previous run finished, and it does not shift if a run is slow or skipped.

A frequent slip is writing 5 * * * * instead. That pins the minute field to the literal value 5, so the job runs once per hour at five past, 24 times a day instead of 288. If a five-minute job suddenly seems to run hourly, check for a missing */ before anything else.

Where five-minute cadence fits in production

Five minutes is the workhorse interval of operations tooling. Uptime and health checks, Prometheus-style exporters that push to a gateway, session and temp-file cleanup sweeps, and mail-queue retries all commonly ride */5. It is frequent enough to bound detection latency at five minutes yet cheap enough that most services never notice the traffic.

One caution: since */5 is clock-aligned, every host running the same crontab hits shared infrastructure at the identical instant. On a fleet, offset the phase per host, for example 1-56/5 on one group and 3-58/5 on another, so a hundred machines do not stampede one endpoint at minute zero.

Frequently asked

Is */5 the same as 0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55?: Yes, for the minute field the two are exactly equivalent. The step form is just shorter and easier to change later. Cron expands */5 to the full list internally before matching.
Does */5 mean five minutes after the previous run completed?: No. Cron schedules against the wall clock, so runs land at fixed minutes regardless of how long each one takes. If a run takes six minutes, the next one still starts on schedule and overlaps it, so add a lock if the job is not safe to run concurrently.
How do I run every 5 minutes but only at night?: Constrain the hour field. */5 0-5 * * * fires every five minutes between 00:00 and 05:55 local time and stays silent the rest of the day. Ranges in the hour field are inclusive on both ends.

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