Forcing the order of output fields from cut command

Question

I want to do something like this:

cat abcd.txt | cut -f 2,1 

and I want the order to be 2 and then 1 in the output. On the machine I am testing

Answer 1

Lars' answer was great but I found an even better one. The issue with his is it matches \t\t as no columns. To fix this use the following:

awk -v OFS="  " -F"\t" '{print $2, $1}' abcd.txt

Where:

-F"\t" is what to cut on exactly (tabs).

-v OFS=" " is what to seperate with (two spaces)

Example:

echo 'A\tB\t\tD' | awk -v OFS="    " -F"\t" '{print $2, $4, $1, $3}'

This outputs:

B    D    A