Rearranging many columns with awk

Question

I have a file with over 800 columns, and I want to perform some mild column rearrangement. In particular, I need to drop a few columns, and make the last column the first column.

I programmatically generate a simple awk script to perform the rearrangement. It looks like the following:

{ 
  print $820,$2,$3,$4, [lots more here, but skipping a few], $819
}

On one computer, this works just fine. On another computer, it only works when I have a couple hundred columns selected, but for more columns, I get a core dump. Is there any way to make this more portable?

Answer 1

Installing gawk fixed this problem... not sure what version of awk was being used previously.