I was running single-file with --crawl-no-parent and it wasn't crawling. I was scratching my head until I looked at the source and saw that you have to specify --crawl-links in order to do any crawling, then --crawl-no-parent modifies the way the crawling is done.
It would help with the user interface if the command exited with an error message if --crawl-no-parent and friends are specified without --crawl-links. I'm sure there are more options like this that depend on other options being enabled.