Forcing the order of output fields from cut command

unix shell awk freebsd gnu-coreutils
Shreeni picture Shreeni · Jun 24, 2009 · Viewed 24.1k times · Source

I want to do something like this:

cat abcd.txt | cut -f 2,1

and I want the order to be 2 and then 1 in the output. On the machine I am testing (FreeBSD 6), this is not happening (its printing in 1,2 order). Can you tell me how to do this?

I know I can always write a shell script to do this reversing, but I am looking for something using the 'cut' command options.

I think I am using version 5.2.1 of coreutils containing cut.

Answer

Lars Haugseth picture Lars Haugseth · Jun 24, 2009

This can't be done using cut. According to the man page:

Selected input is written in the same order that it is read, and is written exactly once.

Patching cut has been proposed many times, but even complete patches have been rejected.

Instead, you can do it using awk, like this:

awk '{print($2,"\t",$1)}' abcd.txt

Replace the \t with whatever you're using as field separator.

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