cron job doesn't output to nohup.out
Why are you using nohup? nohup is a command that tells the running terminal to ignore the hangup signal. cron, however, has no hangup signal, because it is not linked to a terminal session.
In this case, instead of:
nohup scrapy crawl first &You probably want:
scrapy crawl first > first.txt &The last example also works in a terminal, but when you close the terminal, the hangup signal (hup) is sent, which ends the program.