Combinator Attack problems with OCLHC2.01

[Jiminy]

as epixoip said, you need to escape special symbols on your shell
this has nothing to do with oclHashcat

for instance -j $x won't work, because $x is seen as a variable by your operating system. escape it and you are fine

philsmd, 
Thank you for your positive and helpful response. 

This worked  -k "^xx"   before the first dictionary and  "-k i0xx" after the second dictionary seems to work (see below quote from ATOM).  At least it's running now without error. Also searching further, found another post by ATOM that seems to work in place of the -j rule   --rule-right="^^xx" placed after the second dictionary.  I could not get the -j rule to work for the second dictionary at all and   --rule-left="^^xx" would not work before the first dictionary.

I  found another post by ATOM that had a work around as quoted below from another having the same type of problem.

"I can reproduce the problem. Please open a TRAC Ticket.
There's a workaround: Instead of "-j $-" you can use "-k i0-".
PS: You could also use ^ but ^ is the escape character on windows, so you might need to use ^^."

Again, thank you for responding.  I will try to make better searches in the future so as to not waste any more of the expert's time.