Crontab Day of the Week syntax

In crontab does the Day of the Week field run from 0 - 6 or 1 -7?

I am seeing conflicting information on this. wikipedia states 0-6 and other sites I have seen are 1-7.

Also what would be the implication or either using 0 or 7 incorrectly? i.e. would the cron still run?

Solution 1:

0 and 7 both stand for Sunday, you can use the one you want, so writing 0-6 or 1-7 has the same result.

Also, as suggested by @Henrik, it is possible to replace numbers by shortened name of days, such as MON, THU, etc:

0 - Sun      Sunday
1 - Mon      Monday
2 - Tue      Tuesday
3 - Wed      Wednesday
4 - Thu      Thursday
5 - Fri      Friday
6 - Sat      Saturday
7 - Sun      Sunday

Graphically, * * * * * command to be executed stands for:

minute	hour	day of month	month	day of week
(0-59)	(0-23)	(1-31)	(1-12)	(1-7)
*	*	*	*	*	command to be executed

Or using the old style:

 ┌────────── minute (0 - 59)
 │ ┌──────── hour (0 - 23)
 │ │ ┌────── day of month (1 - 31)
 │ │ │ ┌──── month (1 - 12)
 │ │ │ │ ┌── day of week (0 - 6 => Sunday - Saturday, or
 │ │ │ │ │                1 - 7 => Monday - Sunday)
 ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓
 * * * * * command to be executed

Finally, if you want to specify day by day, you can separate days with commas, for example SUN,MON,THU will exectute the command only on sundays, mondays on thursdays.

You can read further details in Wikipedia's article about Cron and check a cron expression online with crontab.guru.

Solution 2:

    :-) Sunday    |    0  ->  Sun
                  |  
        Monday    |    1  ->  Mon
       Tuesday    |    2  ->  Tue
     Wednesday    |    3  ->  Wed
      Thursday    |    4  ->  Thu
        Friday    |    5  ->  Fri
      Saturday    |    6  ->  Sat
                  |  
    :-) Sunday    |    7  ->  Sun

As you can see above, and as said before, the numbers 0 and 7 are both assigned to Sunday. There are also the English abbreviated days of the week listed, which can also be used in the crontab.

Examples of Number or Abbreviation Use

15 09 * * 5,6,0             command
15 09 * * 5,6,7             command
15 09 * * 5-7               command
15 09 * * Fri,Sat,Sun       command

The four examples do all the same and execute a command every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday at 9.15 o'clock.

In Detail

Having two numbers 0 and 7 for Sunday can be useful for writing weekday ranges starting with 0 or ending with 7. So you can write ranges starting with Sunday or ending with it, like 0-2 or 5-7 for example (ranges must start with the lower number and must end with the higher). The abbreviations cannot be used to define a weekday range.