
Cron Expression to English Translator - augustflanagan
https://crontab.guru
======
ColinWright
There was something like this a while back. It was discussed at the time[0]
and had some serious faults. The link[1] no longer works.

So I thought I'd pull out one of the examples from my crontab that didn't work
for that one and try it on this one:

    
    
        6/2-59 * * * *
    

Nope, doesn't work.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8122129](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8122129)

[1] [http://www.cronchecker.net/](http://www.cronchecker.net/)

~~~
encoderer
Hi Colin,

I'm curious, what is the expected behavior here? `6/2` would say "every 2nd
minute, starting from minute 6". You _can_ combine a range and a step like
this: `6-30/2` but I'm not sure how to parse your step with a range.

Is it possible crontab.guru is exposing a bug in your crontab that your
version of cron just happens to be tolerant of?'

Edit: You can see in this line how a range and step is used in a normal for
loop in the cron scheduler:
[https://github.com/rhuitl/uClinux/blob/master/user/vixie-
cro...](https://github.com/rhuitl/uClinux/blob/master/user/vixie-
cron/entry.c#L430)

In this case, the variable "num3" is the step value.

~~~
ColinWright
Huh, that's weird. It looks like something got screwed in the copy/paste
process, because the previous article I linked definitely has the correct
"range/step" format. I thought I had copied it from there, but can't find this
example there. And you're absolutely right, the version I quote here is
syntactically invalid.

So the syntactically valid version does _not_ work in that earlier cron-to-
English translator, but it does appear to work in this version.

My apologies for the error on my part.

~~~
encoderer
Thanks for following up -- we take correctness of Crontab.guru very seriously!

