Cheat Sheets · Cron Cheat Sheet · Cron Every Minute — Crontab Example

Cron Every Minute — Crontab Example

* * * * *

Runs once every minute — 1,440 times a day.

Field by field

Field	Value	Meaning
`Minute`	`*`	Every minute (0–59)
`Hour`	`*`	Every hour
`Day of month`	`*`	Every day
`Month`	`*`	Every month
`Day of week`	`*`	Every day of the week

A fully wildcarded expression fires every minute of every day. That is the right choice for queue workers, health-check pings, and cache warmers — anything that should notice new work within seconds.

At this frequency, guard against overlap: if one run takes longer than a minute, the next starts anyway and runs pile up. Wrap the command with flock so a busy run makes the next one skip instead of stacking:

* * * * * flock -n /tmp/myjob.lock /usr/local/bin/myjob.sh

Related schedules

*/5 * * * * Every 5 minutes */30 * * * * Every 30 minutes 0 * * * * Every hour, on the hour

FAQ

Is every minute too much?
For lightweight idempotent jobs, no — it is the standard polling cadence. Add flock -n (skip if locked) so slow runs never stack. If the work can tolerate delay, step up to */5.

Which timezone does it use?
The timezone of the machine running cron — UTC on most servers. Cloud schedulers (GitHub Actions, Vercel Cron, Cloudflare) are also UTC unless configured otherwise.

How do I pause it without deleting the line?
Comment the line out with # in crontab -e, or add a gate file the script checks at startup.

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Full reference: Cron Cheat Sheet