Cron Job Every Day at 8:00 PM – Expression & Examples
The expression 0 20 * * * triggers once daily at exactly 20:00 (8:00 PM) server time, every day of the week and every month of the year. The fields break down as: minute 0, hour 20, any day-of-month, any month, and any day-of-week. This makes it a simple, fixed-time daily schedule with no intervals or step values to consider.
How It Works
The expression 0 20 * * * triggers once daily at exactly 20:00 (8:00 PM) server time, every day of the week and every month of the year. The fields break down as: minute 0, hour 20, any day-of-month, any month, and any day-of-week. This makes it a simple, fixed-time daily schedule with no intervals or step values to consider.
Common Use Cases
- Send a daily end-of-business email digest or summary report to users or stakeholders at the close of the working day.
- Run a nightly database or file backup job before overnight maintenance windows, ensuring fresh data is captured after the last business activity.
- Trigger a daily data aggregation or analytics pipeline that rolls up the day's user activity, sales, or metrics into a reporting table.
- Post a scheduled daily reminder or notification to a team Slack channel, webhook, or push service at the end of each day.
Monitor a Job on This Schedule
Writing the 0 20 * * * schedule is only half the job. Cron fires silently — if the run is skipped, the server is down, or the script fails, nothing tells you. A heartbeat monitor closes that gap: your job pings a URL on success, and you get an alert the moment an expected run goes missing. CronJobPro can run this schedule for you as an HTTP job, or watch a job you run elsewhere (cron, CI, Kubernetes) with a dead-man's-switch check.
Schedule This Cron Job Now
Create a free CronJobPro account and use 0 20 * * * to schedule HTTP requests automatically — with monitoring, retries, and notifications built in.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does 0 20 * * * mean in cron?
The expression 0 20 * * * triggers once daily at exactly 20:00 (8:00 PM) server time, every day of the week and every month of the year. The fields break down as: minute 0, hour 20, any day-of-month, any month, and any day-of-week. This makes it a simple, fixed-time daily schedule with no intervals or step values to consider.
How do I use this cron expression?
On Linux/macOS, edit your crontab with crontab -e and add:0 20 * * * /path/to/your/script.sh
Or use CronJobPro to schedule HTTP requests with this expression — no server required.
What timezone does cron use?
By default, cron uses the system timezone. CronJobPro lets you set a specific timezone per job, so your schedules are predictable regardless of server location.