Git-bash UNIX: Switch columns/fields using cut?

Question

So I have a file with 2 columns as follows:

  10  1
  11  2
  12  3
  13  4
  14  5

I would like to switch the columns using the cut command. I've used

paste <(cut -f2 file.dat) <(cut -f1 file.dat)

And it's giving me the following:

  10  1  10  1
  11  2  11  2
  12  3  12  3
  13  4  13  4
  14  5  14  5

Anyone know how I could use cut and paste to switch the columns? I thought the cut -f1 or cut -f2 would cut each field but apparently not? What am I doing wrong here?

UPDATE: So I'm using -d instead of f and it's giving me weird results and yet when I cat the file, the contents remain unchanged?

Answer 1

The default delimiter for cut is a tab character - if you want to cut space-separated data you will need to specify that using the -d argument.

Your input file appears to use multiple spaces which make it harder:

paste <(cut -d' ' -f5 file.txt) <(cut -d' ' -f3 file.txt)
1   10
2   11
3   12
4   13
5   14

or you could replace spaces by tabs (squeezing out repeats) - note that the fields become -f3 and -f2 because your file has leading whitespace:

paste <(tr -s ' ' '\t' < file.txt | cut -f3) <(tr -s ' ' '\t' < file.txt | cut -f2)

In this case, it would be simpler to use awk e.g.

awk '{print $2,$1}' file.txt

or

awk '{print $2,$1}' OFS='\t' file.txt

if you want tab-separated output (as you would get from paste) ex.

$ awk '{print $2,$1}' OFS='\t' file.txt
1   10
2   11
3   12
4   13
5   14

Answer 2

So I figured what I wanted to do with the following:

cut -d' ' -f1 file.txt > f1.txt

To cut and append the first column to a new file f1.txt

cut -d' ' -f4 file.txt > f2.txt

To cut and append the second column to a new file f2.txt

paste f2.txt f1.txt > file.txt

And finally to overwrite the original file.txt with switched columns.