Directory: Is a directory

I’ve set up a cron job to run a Python script to scrape some web pages.

/etc/crontab

    GNU nano 2.3.1                                  File: crontab

    SHELL=/bin/bash
    PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
    MAILTO=[e-mail]

    # For details see man 4 crontabs

    # Example of job definition:
    # .---------------- minute (0 - 59)
    # |  .------------- hour (0 - 23)
    # |  |  .---------- day of month (1 - 31)
    # |  |  |  .------- month (1 - 12) OR jan,feb,mar,apr ...
    # |  |  |  |  .---- day of week (0 - 6) (Sunday=0 or 7) OR sun,mon,tue,wed,thu,fri,sat
    # |  |  |  |  |
    # *  *  *  *  * user-name  command to be executed

    */2 * * * * root /usr/bin scrapy crawl mycrawler

However, the emails are informing me that…

/bin/bash: /usr/bin: Is a directory

When I manually run the script, it pipes data into my database, but when the cron job executes the script, nothing…

What does the /bin/bash: /usr/bin: Is a directory message allude to?!

Answer

As discussed in comments the very initial error is that the entry places /usr/bin where the executable should be:

*/2 * * * * root /usr/bin scrapy crawl mycrawler
                 ^^^^^^^^
                 command

Once fixed to be scapy, the ultimate issue is that scrapy is in /usr/local/bin which is not in your PATH. To change this:

PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin/

And then you should be able to just do:

 */2 * * * * root cd <project dir> && scrapy crawl mycrawler