Combining 2 different cut outputs in a single command?

I have a file such as the following:

1234
ABCD
EFGH

I’d like to convert it to the following:

2341
BCDA
FGHE

The actual file has 4,000 words, so I would like to do this in an efficient manner. I tried using the command cut -c 2-4,1 file.txt, but it produces the same exact output as the input. I was thinking I could use 3 different commands:

cut -c 1 file.txt > temp1.txt
cut -c 2-4 file.txt > temp2.txt
// combine the two with paste or pr

… but I would prefer a single command because I need to run it several times with slight modifications so running one command is less error prone than running 3 commands each time.

Is there any way to combine the 2 cut statements into one? Something like:

cut -c 1 file.txt | pr (cut -c 2-4 file.txt)

Or is there a better way to do this?

Answers:

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Method 1

With cut and paste you can also do an one-liner:

$ cat file
1234
ABCD
EFGH
$ paste --delimiter=''  <(cut file -c2-4) <(cut file -c1)
2341
BCDA
FGHE

Method 2

Using sed:

sed 's:^(.)(.*):21:' file.txt

2341
BCDA
FGHE

Method 3

If you use bash, use the string indexing of parameter expansion:

while IFS= read -r word; do
  echo "${word:1:3}${word:0:1}"
done < file.txt

Method 4

$ cat test
1234
ABCD
EFGH
$ awk -F "" '{print $2$3$4$1}' test
2341
BCDA
FGHE

You can change the separator via “-F” according to your data, and arrange the order of fields arbitrarily.

Method 5

Here’s one way with perl:

perl -F'' -lane 'print @F[<a href="https://getridbug.com/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection" class="__cf_email__" data-cfemail="1c2d32325c5a">[email protected]</a>], $F[0]'

Auto-split at letter boundaries, rotate one to the left and print.

Method 6

I found an alternative in a script way:

~$ cut -c2- file.txt>file2.txt
~$ cut -c1 file.txt>file3.txt
~$ paste -d "" file2.txt file3.txt>file4.txt
~$ rm file2.txt file3.txt

The script cuts the chains in a separate files.
Then join into a new file (file4.txt)
And finally removes the spare files.

the llua solution is more clean for my taste.

Method 7

Have you tried rev ?

~$ cat filename | rev

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0