What does nextcrons do?

nextcrons will read a crontab file and tell you which cron jobs are scheduled to be executed next.

How do I use nextcrons?

An example:

$ python nextcrons.py crontabfile
Sep 15, 2012 at 03:52 PM
(0:01:00 from now)
    sh ~/jobs/job2.sh

Sep 15, 2012 at 03:55 PM
(0:04:00 from now)
    sh ~/jobs/job1.sh

Sep 16, 2012 at 12:30 AM
(8:39:00 from now)
    sh ~/jobs/job3.sh

What cron standard does this follow?

ISC Cron V4.1. See the manpage for details.

Some things however, are unsupported:

• nicknames like @weekly

Some non standard things are incidentally supported:

• named ranges like mon-wed or apr-aug.

Can I use it programmatically?

Yes, but it's not too exciting because currently, the API only exists to do a rather small task: find the next time a cron job will run.

Check out the docstrings for CronJob and CronTab for more info.