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

I've used below two scripts to do similar operations before. The first is in awk which is a lot faster than the second which is in "pure" bash. You might be able to adapt it to your own application.

awk '
{
    for (i = 1; i <= NF; i++) {
        s[i] = s[i]?s[i] FS $i:$i
    }
}
END {
    for (i in s) {
        print s[i]
    }
}' file.txt

declare -a arr

while IFS= read -r line
do
    i=0
    for word in $line
    do
        [[ ${arr[$i]} ]] && arr[$i]="${arr[$i]} $word" || arr[$i]=$word
        ((i++))
    done
done < file.txt

for ((i=0; i < ${#arr[@]}; i++))
do
    echo ${arr[i]}
done