How the day-of-week field works
The fifth field in standard POSIX cron is the day-of-week (0–7), where 0 and 7 both represent Sunday, and 1–6 represent Monday through Saturday respectively. The range 1-5 matches Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday — the standard five-day working week.
When the day-of-week field is constrained (not *) and the day-of-month field is left as *, cron uses only the day-of-week constraint. The job runs on any day that satisfies the weekday requirement, regardless of the calendar day of the month.
Common use cases for weekday schedules
Weekday-restricted cron jobs are ideal for business-hours automation: sending daily standup digests, triggering morning data pipelines, generating sales reports for trading-day close, refreshing business dashboards before business hours begin, or running end-of-day reconciliation jobs. Restricting to weekdays avoids wasted compute on Saturdays and Sundays when no staff are available to act on results.