Run a Cron Job Every 5 Minutes

Executes the job every 5 minutes.

crontab -e

*/5****

$*/5 * * * *

Field Breakdown

*/5

Minute

0–59

*

Hour

0–23

*

Day of Month

1–31

*

Month

1–12

*

Day of Week

0–6

How It Works

The step operator / divides the minute field into equal intervals. */5 means "starting at 0, fire every 5th minute" — so the job runs at :00, :05, :10, :15 … :55 each hour. This is one of the most popular cron schedules for periodic data syncs, cache refreshes, and lightweight monitoring. It provides a good balance between responsiveness and resource usage, executing 288 times per day.

The / operator creates a step pattern. */5 in the minute field tells cron to fire at every minute divisible by 5, starting from 0. This produces the series 0, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50, 55 — twelve times per hour. The remaining fields are all wildcards, so there is no restriction on hour, day, month, or weekday.

Platform Usage

In a Linux crontab: "*/5 * * * * /usr/local/bin/sync-data.sh >> /var/log/sync.log 2>&1". In Kubernetes, set schedule: "*/5 * * * *" on your CronJob spec. AWS EventBridge supports this as a cron expression for Lambda triggers. Most Node.js cron libraries like node-cron and Bull accept this exact syntax.