PatternCron

Every minute

The finest-grained cron schedule there is: fires every single minute, all day — built for short debugging runs, not for shipping to production.

Last updated

Pattern
* * * * *
Open in Crontab Schedule Creator

In plain English

  • Fires every minute of every hour
  • 1,440 runs per day

Why it’s written this way

All five fields are left as *, so cron imposes no restriction anywhere: any minute, any hour, any day, any month, any weekday. That's the entire expression — the widest-open schedule the format can produce.

Minute is the finest resolution cron understands; there's no field below it. If a job needs sub-minute timing, the job itself has to loop internally — cron just launches it once per qualifying minute.

Edge cases to know

  • That's 1,440 runs a day — useful for confirming a job's plumbing works, but treat it as a placeholder: widen the schedule (say, */5 or hourly) before this ships anywhere real.
  • Each firing starts a brand-new process. A job that takes longer than a minute to finish will have its next invocation start before the previous one is done, unless something serializes them.
  • A minute-by-minute job floods cron's mail or log output fast if MAILTO or logging is on — mute the output deliberately rather than discovering it via a pager alert.

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