reordering columns with AWK - command-line

Question

I need to reorder the columns of this (tab-separated) data:
1 cat plays
1 dog eats
1 horse runs
1 red dog
1 the cat
1 the cat
so that is prints like:
cat plays 1
dog eats 1
horse runs 1
red dog 1
the cat 2
i have tried:
sort [input] | uniq -c | awk '{print $2 "\t" $3 "\t" $1}' > [output]
and the result is:
1 cat 1
1 dog 1
1 horse 1
1 red 1
2 the 1
Can anyone give me some insight on what is going wrong?
Thank you.

Answer 1

Since the output of cat input | sort | uniq -c is:
1 1 cat plays
1 1 dog eats
1 1 horse runs
1 1 red dog
2 1 the cat
you need something like:
cat input | sort | uniq -c | awk '{print $3 "\t" $4 "\t" $1}'
And we can also indicate the output field separator in awk:
cat input | sort | uniq -c | awk -v OFS="\t" '{print $3,$4,$1}'

Answer 2

uniq -c adds an extra column. This should give you the output you want:
$ sort file | uniq -c | awk '{print $3 "\t" $4 "\t" $1}'
cat plays 1
dog eats 1
horse runs 1
red dog 1
the cat 2

Answer 3

With awk and sort:
$ awk '{a[$2 OFS $3]++}END{for(k in a)print k,a[k]}' OFS='\t' file | sort -nk3
cat plays 1
dog eats 1
horse runs 1
red dog 1
the cat 2

Answer 4

If you have GNU awk (gawk), you could use only it and its feature function asorti():
#!/usr/bin/env gawk -f
{
a[$2 "\t" $3]++
}
END {
asorti(a, b)
for (i = 1; i in b; ++i) print b[i] "\t" a[b[i]]
}
One line:
gawk '{++a[$2"\t"$3]}END{asorti(a,b);for(i=1;i in b;++i)print b[i]"\t"a[b[i]]}' file
Output:
cat plays 1
dog eats 1
horse runs 1
red dog 1
the cat 2
UPDATE: To preserve original order without sorting use:
#!/usr/bin/awk -f
!a[$2 "\t" $3]++ {
b[++i] = $2 "\t" $3
}
END {
for (j = 1; j <= i; ++j) print b[j] "\t" a[b[j]]
}
Or
awk '!a[$2"\t"$3]++{b[++i]=$2"\t"$3}END{for(j=1;j<=i;++j)print b[j]"\t"a[b[j]]}' file
Any awk version would be compatible with that this time.
Output should be the same this time since input is already sorted by default.