The problem

Developers routinely have to leave the terminal and visit crontab.guru to verify what a cron expression actually schedules — there is no zero-dependency CLI tool that explains cron syntax and shows upcoming run times inline.

If you've hit this before, you know how it goes — you switch tabs, paste the expression into crontab.guru, then switch back. Every. Single. Time.

As a solution, I created cronread

Explain a cron expression in plain English and show the next N scheduled run times

It's zero-dependency Node.js, so you can run it immediately without installing anything:

npx cronread "*/15 9-17 * * 1-5"

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Output:

$ npx cronread "*/15 9-17 * * 1-5" Pattern : */15 9-17 * * 1-5 Schedule: every 15 minutes, between 9:00 and 17:00, on Monday to Friday

Next 5 runs (local time): 1. 2026-05-12 Tue 09:15 2. 2026-05-12 Tue 09:30 3. 2026-05-12 Tue 09:45 4. 2026-05-12 Tue 10:00 5.…