Question

I currently am trying to use awk to rearrange a .csv file that is similar to the following:

stack,over,flow,dot,com

and the output would be:

over,com,stack,flow,dot

(or any other order, just using this as an example)

and when it comes time to rearrange the csv file, I have been trying to use the following:

first='$2'
second='$5'
third='$1'
fourth='$3'
fifth='$4'

awk -v a=$first -v b=$second -v c=$third -v d=$fourth -v e=$fifth -F '^|,|$' '{print $a,$b,$c,$d,$e}' somefile.csv

with the intent of awk/print interpreting the $a,$b,$c,etc as field numbers, so it would come out to the following:

{print $2,$5,$1,$3,$4}

and print out the fields of the csv file in that order, but unfortunately I have not been able to get this to work correctly yet. I’ve tried several different methods, this seeming like the most promising, but unfortunately have not been able to get any solution to work correctly yet. Having said that, I was wondering if anyone could possibly give any suggestions or point out my flaw as I am stumped at this point in time, any help would be much appreciated, thanks!

Answer 1

Use simple numbers:

first='2'
second='5'
third='1'
fourth='3'
fifth='4'

awk -v a=$first -v b=$second -v c=$third -v d=$fourth -v e=$fifth -F '^|,|$' \
     '{print $a, $b, $c, $d, $e}' somefile.csv