How to deal with an error in cut --complement command?

Question

I am facing an error in cut command and tried to find a solution but were not helpful. I have a tab-delimited file that I pipe to replace the tabs with comma. Then I pipe to get rid of specific columns using cut --complement but I get this error:

cut: [-cf] list: illegal list value

My command:

cat input.txt | grep -v '#' | tr '\t' ',' | cut -d ',' -f2,3,4,5,6 --complement | head

When I remove the --complement it prints the columns 2,3,4,5,6 but with the --complement it does not work.

Any help will be appreciated.

Answer 1

BSD cut doesn't have a --complement option. In this specific case, you can use:

cut -d , -f 1,7-

instead of

cut -d ',' -f2,3,4,5,6 --complement