problems with cut

[pytheas22]

I'm trying to do a simple thing with cut but am having trouble, probably because I'm missing something obvious.

The file file contains this line:


one two three

The command:


cut -d ' ' -f 1,2,3 file

returns:


one two three

as expected. But the command:

cut -d ' ' -f 1,3,2 file

also returns:


one two three

I want two and three to be inverted, so that cut returns:


one three two

Could anyone point out where I'm going wrong. I'm sure this is a simple, simple thing...

[pytheas22]

So, that was dumb. I guess cut doesn't reorder fields. I need to use awk instead:


awk '{print $1,$3,$2}' file
one three two