I ran into an issue the other day with a customer scheduling an Azure WebJob. When creating a WebJob that will execute on a schedule, crontab syntax is used to define the schedule.

However, Microsoft doesn’t use standard crontab syntax. Typically, the crontab syntax consists of 5 fields with the possible values:

• Minute
• Hour
• Day of the month
• Month
• Day of the week

But Microsoft’s syntax is:

• Second
• Minute
• Hour
• Day of the month
• Month
• Day of the week

Normally, to have a cronjob run every second on a Linux server, you would divide the minute by 60 as follows:

*/60 * * * *

However, with an Azure WebJob you would just write it as:

* * * * * *

It would have been nice to note this in their documentation when setting up an Azure WebJob via Azure Portal.