UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

This is my input file :

Code:

FCBAFE572C5E4BA29B3F8030BD480A94,907 ,1/1/2003,12/31/2005,ACT,1,2010-05-07 04:42:26.380000
2345AD5D2BFB29C821C1BC3DE8B746A7,907 ,1/1/2004,1/31/2005,ACT,1,2010-05-07 04:42:26.380000
E45B7371EEC0D1AB00E1750B5BC661F7,907 ,1/1/2004,12/31/2006,ACT,1,2010-05-07 04:42:26.380000

I am using this command :

Code:

cut -d ',' -f 1,2,4,3,5 f1.txt > temp.txt

but the output is still formed in the existing order rather the order i have mentioned.

Can anyone help?

You could postprocess with awk or sed to swap fields. Awk would gladly do the cut, too.

Hi.

The only cut I know that prints in the order you specify is on AIX, so I think you're stuck with it.

Use awk, or something else, instead.

i.e.

Code:

awk -F, '{print $1, $2, $4, $3, $5}' OFS=, f1.txt > temp.txt

The HP-UX "cut" behaves the same. It just outputs your selection of fields working left-to-right regardless of the order of the parameters on the command line.

@scottn :

The solution provided by you was really good.

I just want to make that reusable.

The values $1,$2,$4,$3 will be passed from a variable.

Can we loop this awk script by getting the required as parameters as input ?

Sounds like a nice addition to open source cut code, if it is missing. Oops, it is now a Google world, so I should go look myself; apparently, opinions vary and IBM does as it pleases:

Interesting!

I've just looked at a couple of our older AIX's and can't reproduce the behaviour I said existed.

But I vividly remember debugging a problem when migrating a script from AIX to Linux that exhibited odd behaviour, and it was because cut on the AIX box was preserving the order as given on the command line.

That server has since been rebuilt and is at a higher technology level.

So, either
a) I dreamt it (vividly!)
b) there was such a version distributed at some point in time
c) someone went to some trouble to replace standard cut with a modified one

Oh well, it's no big deal