Cron expression for every 6 hours
At minute 0 past every 6th hour
At minute 0 past every 6th hour
Try this expression in the interactive tool:
Open in cron explainer →Next 10 scheduled runs
Common use cases
Four times a day — midnight, 6:00, 12:00, and 18:00 — is a common schedule for tasks that need to run multiple times daily but don't need hourly frequency.
Database backup snapshots are a classic use case. A 6-hourly backup gives you a maximum 6-hour recovery point objective (RPO), which is acceptable for many non-critical systems. Combined with continuous WAL archiving for PostgreSQL or binary log shipping for MySQL, the snapshots serve as a safety net.
Data pipeline stages that aggregate and transform data for downstream consumers also fit this pattern.
Platform-specific syntax
0 */6 * * * /path/to/script.shcron(0 0/6 * * ? *)schedule:
- cron: '0 */6 * * *'schedule: "0 */6 * * *"Technical breakdown
The expression 0 */6 * * * has five fields: minute=0, hour=*/6, day (month)=*, month=*, day (week)=*. At minute 0 past every 6th hour.