As seen at https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/cut-invocation.html, the section for ‘-f field-list’
‘--fields=field-list’ hints at some examples of using awk. The second example is wrong. it states:
awk '{print $NF-1}' # print the penultimate field
when it should be
awk '{print $(NF-1)}' # print the penultimate field
i.e., parenthesis missing.