Cron: Every Saturday
0 0 * * 6 fires once a week, every Saturday at midnight — day-of-week 6 in standard cron. Weekend schedules like this are popular for heavy maintenance jobs (backups, reindexing, full syncs) that can tolerate resource use without affecting weekday business traffic.
0 0 * * 6
Examples & Variations
Common Mistakes
- Assuming weekend traffic is always lower — for consumer apps, weekends can be peak usage time, the opposite of typical B2B traffic patterns.
- Scheduling a heavy Saturday job without on-call coverage over the weekend, so a failure goes unnoticed until Monday.
- Running maintenance that locks resources on Saturday if any part of your system still serves weekend users — check your actual traffic profile rather than assuming.
Best Practices
- Verify your specific traffic pattern before assuming weekends are quiet — B2B SaaS often is, but consumer and e-commerce apps frequently see weekend peaks.
- For genuinely heavy jobs (full reindexing, large exports), Saturday early morning is often the best compromise even for apps with some weekend traffic, since it's typically the lowest point in a weekly cycle.
- Keep monitoring active over the weekend for Saturday-scheduled jobs — a silent failure has two extra days to compound before someone notices on Monday.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What number represents Saturday in cron?
- 6. Standard cron's day-of-week field runs 0 (Sunday) through 6 (Saturday), making Saturday the last index.
- How do I run something every Saturday and Sunday?
- Use a list: 0 0 * * 0,6 runs at midnight on both Saturday and Sunday, covering the full weekend.
- Is Saturday a good default for weekly backups?
- It's a common and reasonable choice for apps with lower weekend traffic, but always verify against your actual usage data rather than assuming — some businesses see the opposite pattern.
Related Tools
Cron Parser
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Cron Cheat Sheet
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Cron Examples Library
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Cron: Every Friday
The cron expression for every Friday is 0 0 * * 5, running weekly at midnight. See Friday scheduling examples and deployment best practices.
Cron: Every Sunday
The cron expression for every Sunday is 0 0 * * 0, running weekly at midnight. See Sunday scheduling examples and best practices.
Cron: Every Weekday
The cron expression for every weekday (Monday–Friday) is 0 0 * * 1-5. See weekday scheduling examples for business-hours automation.