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

[CracktainCrunch]

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

Code:

combinator three_words.txt one_word.txt > four_words.txt

This is exactly what I used for command. Except for the file names. At first I thought it might be the amount of combinations but that's not it either. Cut down the amount of words in the files to only 25 each and still same result.
When using "hashcat --stdout -a 1 ..." it points me to

Code:

Usage: hashcat [options]... hash|hashfile|hccapxfile [dictionary|mask|directory]...

Try --help for more help.

If I leave "--stdout" out I get this error message

Code:

three_words.txt: Byte Order Mark (BOM) was detected