Cron expression for every 5 minutes

The expression */5 * * * * tells cron to run a job once every five minutes, all day, every day. The */5 in the first field means "every 5th minute" — cron starts at minute 0 and fires at :00, :05, :10, and so on through :55. The four remaining fields are all *, so there is no restriction on hour, day, month, or weekday.

That works out to 12 runs per hour and 288 runs per day. It is a common cadence for polling a queue, refreshing a cache, or running a lightweight health check — frequent enough to feel near-real-time, cheap enough not to overload the system.

A word of caution: */5 divides the 0–59 range evenly, so every interval is exactly five minutes. But steps that do not divide 60 evenly — */7, for example — reset at the top of each hour and produce an uneven final gap. If your job must be evenly spaced, stick to divisors of 60: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20 or 30.

If overlapping runs would cause problems — a slow job that occasionally takes longer than five minutes — cron will happily start a second copy before the first finishes. Add a lock file or use your scheduler's concurrency controls to prevent pile-ups.