I am not running cron on the server that the runcrawl.php script is on. I do not have access to cron on that server, so the "/usr/bin/php /path/to/runcrawl.php" is not applicable to this situation.
The crawl script starts fine when I run wget WITHOUT the "--spider" option, but since I do not want the cron to "wait" for the crawl to finish (on this domain it takes almost an hour) I am using the --spider option which SHOULD trigger the crawl script to start without waiting for a return, but for some reason it is not. I can't really troubleshoot it or look for places where it might be testing for the HTTP_USER_AGENT since the script is encoded.