til/unix/interpret-cron-schedule-from-the-cli.md

Interpret Cron Schedule From The CLI

I encounter cron task schedules infrequently enough that I don't remember how to reliably interpret them at a glance. So when I'm looking over some code and I see something like 12 2,16 * * *, I need to translate it to a human-readable format.

I've typically opened up a browser tab to crontab.guru for this. However, I did just learn about a tool for getting the same information from the CLI.

With the hcron binary, I can pass in a single cron schedule and get the same details right from my terminal.

$ hcron '12 2,16 * * *'
12 2,16 * * *: At 02:12 AM and 04:12 PM

I decided to clone this repo, build the binary from source (it is Go), and then place the hcron binary in my ~/bin directory which is on my path. Once I did that, I could start using the command like above.