Treat Two Columns as One - perl

Question

Sample Text:
$ cat X
Birth Death Name
02/28/42 07/03/69 Brian Jones
11/27/42 09/18/70 Jimi Hendrix
11/19/43 10/04/70 Janis Joplin
12/08/43 07/03/71 Jim Morrison
11/20/46 10/29/71 Duane Allman
After Processing With Perl, column & sed:
$ perl -lae 'print "$F[2]_$F[3] $F[0]"' X | column -t | sed 's/_/ /g'
Name Birth
Brian Jones 02/28/42
Jimi Hendrix 11/27/42
Janis Joplin 11/19/43
Jim Morrison 12/08/43
Duane Allman 11/20/46
This is the exact output I want. But the issue is, I do not want to use column -t | sed 's/_/ /g' at the end.
My intuition is that this can be done only with perl oneliner (without the need of sed or column).
Is it possible? How can I do that?
P.S. I have an awk solution (awk '{print $3"_"$4" "$1}' X | column -t | sed 's/_/ /g')as well for this exact same result. However, I am looking for a perl only solution.

Answer 1

One way
perl -wlnE'say join " ", (split " ", $_, 3)[-1,0]' input.txt
This limits the split to three terms -- first two fields obtained by normally splitting by the given pattern, and then the rest, here comprising the name.
It won't line up nicely as in the shown output.
If the proper alignment is a must, then there's more to do since one must first see the whole file in order to know what the field width should be. Then the "one"-liner (command-line program) is
perl -MList::Util=max -wlne'
push #recs, [ (split " ", $_, 3)[-1,0] ];
END {
$m = max map { length $_->[0] } #recs;
printf("%-${m}s %s\n", #$_) for #recs
}' input.txt
If an apriori-set field width is acceptable, as brought up in a comment, we can do
perl -wlne'printf "%-20s %s\n", (split " ", $_, 3)[-1,0]' input.txt
The saving grace for the obvious short-coming here -- what with names that are longer? -- is that it is only those particular lines that will be out of order.

Answer 2

See if following one liner will be an acceptable solution
perl -ne "/(\S+)\s+\S+\s+(.*)/, printf \"%-13s %s\n\",$2,$1" birth_data.dat
Input birth_data.dat
Birth Death Name
02/28/42 07/03/69 Brian Jones
11/27/42 09/18/70 Jimi Hendrix
11/19/43 10/04/70 Janis Joplin
12/08/43 07/03/71 Jim Morrison
11/20/46 10/29/71 Duane Allman
Output
Name Birth
Brian Jones 02/28/42
Jimi Hendrix 11/27/42
Janis Joplin 11/19/43
Jim Morrison 12/08/43
Duane Allman 11/20/46