Every 5 seconds: /5 * * * ?

Answer

*/5 * * * * ? runs every 5 seconds in Quartz, Spring and other schedulers that put a seconds field first. Standard Unix cron cannot go below one minute.

Every 5 seconds.

*/5
Second (0-59)
Every 5th second starting at 0: 0, 5, 10, 15, … 55
*
Minute (0-59)
Every minute
*
Hour (0-23)
Every hour
*
Day of month (1-31, ? L W)
Every day (no restriction)
*
Month (1-12 or JAN-DEC)
Every month
?
Day of week (1-7 or SUN-SAT (1 = Sunday), ? L # )
No specific value: the day-of-month field decides

Next 10 runs in UTC

120:16:50 Sat, 31 Oct 2026in 2 seconds
220:16:55 Sat, 31 Oct 2026in 7 seconds
320:17 Sat, 31 Oct 2026in 12 seconds
420:17:05 Sat, 31 Oct 2026in 17 seconds
520:17:10 Sat, 31 Oct 2026in 22 seconds
620:17:15 Sat, 31 Oct 2026in 27 seconds
720:17:20 Sat, 31 Oct 2026in 32 seconds
820:17:25 Sat, 31 Oct 2026in 37 seconds
920:17:30 Sat, 31 Oct 2026in 42 seconds
1020:17:35 Sat, 31 Oct 2026in 47 seconds

When it fires

17,280 runs a day on average120,960 a week364 of the next 364 days have a run

Hours of the week (darker = more runs)

The next 52 weeks, one square per day

What to know

The six fields are second, minute, hour, day of month, month and day of week. ? in the last field means "no specific day of week", which Quartz requires when day of month is *.

On a Linux box without such a scheduler, use a systemd timer (OnUnitActiveSec=5s, AccuracySec=1s) or a small loop in a supervised service. Twelve crontab lines with sleep 5, sleep 10 … work but are fragile.

Variations

0 * * * * ?
Quartz: every minute, at second 0Every minute.
*/30 * * * * ?
every 30 secondsEvery 30 seconds.

Gotchas

Spring's @Scheduled(cron = "*/5 * * * * *") also accepts * in both day fields.
node-cron and similar libraries treat six fields as seconds-first; a 5-field expression there means minutes as usual.

Related explainers

← Explain any cron expression

Every 5 seconds: */5 * * * * ?