Cron Every 7 Minutes

The cron expression */7 * * * * triggers a job approximately every 7 minutes — at minutes 0, 7, 14, 21, 28, 35, 42, 49, and 56 each hour. However, because 60 is not evenly divisible by 7, there's a shorter 4-minute gap between :56 and :00 of the next hour.

This uneven gap is a common gotcha with cron step values. Step values like */5, */10, */15, and */20 divide evenly into 60 and produce uniform intervals. Values like */7, */11, or */13 reset at the top of each hour, creating one shorter interval.

For most use cases, this slight unevenness doesn't matter. But if you need perfectly uniform 7-minute intervals, you'll need an external scheduler that tracks state between invocations rather than relying on cron's clock-based matching.