Hey not sure but maybe it's because you're not root? like if you 1st try: sudo su then confirm the password.
Then when you want to view the file, make sure you're in the same location.
So like mine defaults to /home/kali
So say if I ran crunch 5 5 jason -o crunch.txt it would save the file to location /home/kali
Next if I typed ls -l afterward it would show the files in that location (/home/kali) and the permissions of these files.
Hope that helps a little.