Shell Programming and Scripting

Ok I'm working on this school assignment and I'm sure there is a simple solution to this but I can't find it anywhere. The scenario is that I have to write a script with a menu and stuff like that. One of the options has to be to generate a sales report from a database called items.dat. Items.dat is just a file with 3 : separated columns. I need to output items.dat as standard output but I need to display column 3 first column 2 second and column 1 last.

I've tried cut -d: -f3,2,1 items.dat but that doesn't work.

Maybe there is a way I could cut each one and then merge it back together?

P.S. it is a bash shell script. and please ask me if something is unclear.

Thanks in advance

please read the man page of cut again. especially the part where it describes how to define fields and ranges.

I've tried defining fields in the above command however it still displays them in 1,2,3 order even though I have specified 3,2,1.

Maybe you see something I don't... like I said, I'm a bit of a newb at this stuff.

Thanks though for the quick reply

cut doesn't really do what you want,ie display 3rd field first then the rest.
you can use awk

Code:

awk '{print $3,$2,$1}' file

That seems to be exactly what I need. Thanks so much