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

Here is a Bash one-liner that is based on simply converting each line to a column and paste-ing them together:

echo '' > tmp1;  \
cat m.txt | while read l ; \
            do    paste tmp1 <(echo $l | tr -s ' ' \\n) > tmp2; \
                  cp tmp2 tmp1; \
            done; \
cat tmp1

m.txt:

0 1 2
4 5 6
7 8 9
10 11 12

1. creates tmp1 file so it's not empty.

2. reads each line and transforms it into a column using tr

3. pastes the new column to the tmp1 file

4. copies result back into tmp1.

PS: I really wanted to use io-descriptors but couldn't get them to work.

Answer 2

the transpose project on sourceforge is a coreutil-like C program for exactly that.

gcc transpose.c -o transpose
./transpose -t input > output #works with stdin, too.

Answer 3

Another bash variant

$ cat file 
XXXX    col1    col2    col3
row1    0       1       2
row2    3       4       5
row3    6       7       8
row4    9       10      11

Script

#!/bin/bash

I=0
while read line; do
    i=0
    for item in $line; { printf -v A$I[$i] $item; ((i++)); }
    ((I++))
done < file
indexes=$(seq 0 $i)

for i in $indexes; {
    J=0
    while ((J<I)); do
        arr="A$J[$i]"
        printf "${!arr}\t"
        ((J++))
    done
    echo
}

Output

$ ./test 
XXXX    row1    row2    row3    row4    
col1    0       3       6       9   
col2    1       4       7       10  
col3    2       5       8       11

Answer 4

awk '
{ 
    for (i=1; i<=NF; i++)  {
        a[NR,i] = $i
    }
}
NF>p { p = NF }
END {    
    for(j=1; j<=p; j++) {
        str=a[1,j]
        for(i=2; i<=NR; i++){
            str=str" "a[i,j];
        }
        print str
    }
}' file

output

$ more file
0 1 2
3 4 5
6 7 8
9 10 11

$ ./shell.sh
0 3 6 9
1 4 7 10
2 5 8 11

Performance against Perl solution by Jonathan on a 10000 lines file

$ head -5 file
1 0 1 2
2 3 4 5
3 6 7 8
4 9 10 11
1 0 1 2

$  wc -l < file
10000

$ time perl test.pl file >/dev/null

real    0m0.480s
user    0m0.442s
sys     0m0.026s

$ time awk -f test.awk file >/dev/null

real    0m0.382s
user    0m0.367s
sys     0m0.011s

$ time perl test.pl file >/dev/null

real    0m0.481s
user    0m0.431s
sys     0m0.022s

$ time awk -f test.awk file >/dev/null

real    0m0.390s
user    0m0.370s
sys     0m0.010s

EDIT by Ed Morton (@ghostdog74 feel free to delete if you disapprove).

Maybe this version with some more explicit variable names will help answer some of the questions below and generally clarify what the script is doing. It also uses tabs as the separator which the OP had originally asked for so it'd handle empty fields and it coincidentally pretties-up the output a bit for this particular case.

$ cat tst.awk
BEGIN { FS=OFS="\t" }
{
    for (rowNr=1;rowNr<=NF;rowNr++) {
        cell[rowNr,NR] = $rowNr
    }
    maxRows = (NF > maxRows ? NF : maxRows)
    maxCols = NR
}
END {
    for (rowNr=1;rowNr<=maxRows;rowNr++) {
        for (colNr=1;colNr<=maxCols;colNr++) {
            printf "%s%s", cell[rowNr,colNr], (colNr < maxCols ? OFS : ORS)
        }
    }
}

$ awk -f tst.awk file
X       row1    row2    row3    row4
column1 0       3       6       9
column2 1       4       7       10
column3 2       5       8       11

The above solutions will work in any awk (except old, broken awk of course - there YMMV).

The above solutions do read the whole file into memory though - if the input files are too large for that then you can do this:

$ cat tst.awk
BEGIN { FS=OFS="\t" }
{ printf "%s%s", (FNR>1 ? OFS : ""), $ARGIND }
ENDFILE {
    print ""
    if (ARGIND < NF) {
        ARGV[ARGC] = FILENAME
        ARGC++
    }
}
$ awk -f tst.awk file
X       row1    row2    row3    row4
column1 0       3       6       9
column2 1       4       7       10
column3 2       5       8       11

which uses almost no memory but reads the input file once per number of fields on a line so it will be much slower than the version that reads the whole file into memory. It also assumes the number of fields is the same on each line and it uses GNU awk for ENDFILE and ARGIND but any awk can do the same with tests on FNR==1 and END.

Answer 5

GNU datamash is perfectly suited for this problem with only one line of code and potentially arbitrarily large filesize!

datamash -W transpose infile > outfile

Answer 6

I was just looking for similar bash tranpose but with support for padding. Here is the script I wrote based on fgm's solution, that seem to work. If it can be of help...

#!/bin/bash 
declare -a array=( )                      # we build a 1-D-array
declare -a ncols=( )                      # we build a 1-D-array containing number of elements of each row

SEPARATOR="\t";
PADDING="";
MAXROWS=0;
index=0
indexCol=0
while read -a line; do
    ncols[$indexCol]=${#line[@]};
((indexCol++))
if [ ${#line[@]} -gt ${MAXROWS} ]
    then
         MAXROWS=${#line[@]}
    fi    
    for (( COUNTER=0; COUNTER<${#line[@]}; COUNTER++ )); do
        array[$index]=${line[$COUNTER]}
        ((index++))

    done
done < "$1"

for (( ROW = 0; ROW < MAXROWS; ROW++ )); do
  COUNTER=$ROW;
  for (( indexCol=0; indexCol < ${#ncols[@]}; indexCol++ )); do
if [ $ROW -ge ${ncols[indexCol]} ]
    then
      printf $PADDING
    else
  printf "%s" ${array[$COUNTER]}
fi
if [ $((indexCol+1)) -lt ${#ncols[@]} ]
then
  printf $SEPARATOR
    fi
    COUNTER=$(( COUNTER + ncols[indexCol] ))
  done
  printf "\n" 
done