The direct answer for cron expression 0 13 * * 1-5 meaning, crontab 0 13 * * 1-5 meaning, and crontab expression 0 13 * * 1-5 meaning is: run at 1:00 PM Monday through Friday. The first 0 is minute zero, 13 is the hour on the 24-hour clock, the two middle asterisks allow every day of month and every month, and 1-5 limits the schedule to weekdays. It skips Saturday and Sunday.
Most confusion comes from the position of the number 5. In 0 13 * * 1-5, the 5 is part of the weekday range Monday-Friday. It is not 5 AM, and it is not an every-five-minutes interval. Count the fields before copying: five-field cron starts with minute and hour, while six-field cron usually starts with seconds.
Cron expression 0 5 * * * is a different schedule because the 5 sits in the hour field. It runs once per day at 5:00 AM server time with no weekday filter. Use 0 13 * * 1-5 for weekday 1 PM jobs, and use 0 5 * * * only when you want a daily early-morning job.
If your query included 0 */5 * * * *, check the cron format before copying it. In six-field Quartz or Spring cron, the leading 0 is the seconds field and */5 in the minute field means every 5 minutes. In standard five-field Unix cron, the equivalent every-5-minutes expression is */5 * * * *.
Friday-only searches follow the same field logic. Cron expression 0 10 * * 5 means Friday at 10:00 AM, 0 18 * * 5 means Friday at 6:00 PM, and 0 20 * * 5 means Friday at 8:00 PM. The final 5 is the weekday selector for Friday in standard Unix cron.
When deciding which answer matches your search, count the fields first. Five fields means standard Unix crontab with minute, hour, day of month, month, and weekday. Six fields usually means Quartz or Spring cron with seconds first. Then look at the last field: `1-5` means Monday through Friday, while `5` means Friday only.
For 2026 production jobs, document whether the scheduler uses UTC or local server time before shipping any of these expressions. GitHub Actions uses UTC, while Linux crontab often follows the host timezone. Add clear logs, idempotent writes, and last-success monitoring so a weekday 1 PM job or daily 5 AM job is easy to verify after deployment.