swap columns and it's column values

[pigna]

A certain progam provides a column based output but column order is different for systems/versions.
Simplefied something like this:

System A:

ColB ColA ColC ColD
1 4 1 1
2 2 5 4
1 3 0 1

System B:

ColD ColB ColA ColC
1 2 0 4
1 7 5 1
1 2 0 1


To process these files I need to swap columns and its values. Preferred way is to swap columns and set them in alphabetically order so they can be processed together in an external program:

So output file for System A would become

ColA ColB ColC ColD
4 1 1 1
2 2 5 4
3 1 0 1

Output file System B:

ColA ColB ColC ColD
0 2 4 1
5 7 1 1
0 2 1 1


Any help is much appreciated!

 

[Annihilannic]

I'm sure there is a more elegant solution than this, but see how it goes:

awk '
NR==1 {
        for (i=1;i<=NF;i++) { col[$i]=i ; colsorted[i]=$i }
        ncols=asort(colsorted)
}
{
        for (i=1; i<=ncols; i++) { printf($col[colsorted[i]] OFS); }
        print ""
}
'

Annihilannic.