Extracting columns in particular order

[andy_wood]

Hi,

Say I have a text file with10 columns. I need to reorder them based on a list of column numbers that will reorder them.

My problem is this:

If I want to cut out 5 columns (columns 1,2,3,9,10) in the order 1,10,2,9,3 then I have tried using:

cut -f1,10,2,9,3 my_file.txt > reordered_file.txt

But this just extracts the columns in order as if I used:

cut -f1,2,3,9,10 my_file.txt > reordered_file.txt

How can I cut these columns and place them into the new file in the order I specify? Does anyone know whether I need to use awk to do this and if so could someone help with the syntax, or give a link to help me?

While this might seem quite trivial, I will actually need to do this for a file containing ~14000 columns with ~12000 columns that I need to extract in a particular order.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Many thanks,

[tpl]

awk '{print $1 $10 $2 $9 $3}' <filename

[drl]

Hi.

There is a short perl code that may be of interest:

# The Missing Textutils, Ondrej Bojar, obo@cuni.cz
# http://www1.cuni.cz/~obo/textutils/recut
#
# 'recut' is a simple 'cut' but unlike 'cut' allows for repetitions and
# reordering of columns:
#  recut 3-5,1,2

However, you would need perl, which can be an obstacle for some folks.

Best wishes ... cheers, drl