How to go about a password you know has 3 - 5 more or less known words?

[philsmd]

my guess is that you messed your command up.

maybe you specified a wrong file. Make sure that everything after "combinator" is a text file. for instance "combinator combinator ... " do not make sense.

What are the commands that you used, exactly ! ???

you could use "hashcat --stdout -a 1 ..." as an alternative (as mentioned above) if you really think that something is not working correctly with combinator