[CentOS] Cut command behaviour - bug or feature

[m.roth at 5-cent.us]

Rajagopal Swaminathan wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> I have a CSV file with three fields.
> eg.
>
> a1,b1,c1
> a2,b2,c2
> ....
>
> I wanted the output to be:
> b1,c1,a1
> b2,c2,a2
> ....
>
> the command
> cut -d, -f2,3,1 <file>
>
> returns
>
> a1,b1,c1
>
> cut -d, -f2,3 <file>
>
> works as advertised.
>
> Is it specific to linux?
>
> In that case how do I go about swapping two columns? I do not think a
> gazzillion byte gui is required.
>
> The file size is about 43Megs.

I've never been that good with cut. I'm going to see the author, Dave
Ihnat this weekend, who sometimes shows up here... but in the meantime,
you might use
awk 'BEGIN {FS=",";}{print $2 "," $3 "," $1;}' infile

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