An efficient way to transpose a file in Bash

Question

I have a huge tab-separated file formatted like this

X column1 column2 column3
row1 0 1 2
row2 3 4 5
row3 6 7 8
row4 9 10 11

I would like t

Answer 1

If you only want to grab a single (comma delimited) line $N out of a file and turn it into a column:

head -$N file | tail -1 | tr ',' '\n'