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

Another awk solution and limited input with the size of memory you have.

awk '{ for (i=1; i<=NF; i++) RtoC[i]= (RtoC[i]? RtoC[i] FS $i: $i) }
    END{ for (i in RtoC) print RtoC[i] }' infile

This joins each same filed number positon into together and in END prints the result that would be first row in first column, second row in second column, etc. Will output:

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