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

Pure BASH, no additional process. A nice exercise:

declare -a array=( )                      # we build a 1-D-array

read -a line < "$1"                       # read the headline

COLS=${#line[@]}                          # save number of columns

index=0
while read -a line ; do
    for (( COUNTER=0; COUNTER<${#line[@]}; COUNTER++ )); do
        array[$index]=${line[$COUNTER]}
        ((index++))
    done
done < "$1"

for (( ROW = 0; ROW < COLS; ROW++ )); do
  for (( COUNTER = ROW; COUNTER < ${#array[@]}; COUNTER += COLS )); do
    printf "%s\t" ${array[$COUNTER]}
  done
  printf "\n" 
done

Answer 2

#!/bin/bash

aline="$(head -n 1 file.txt)"
set -- $aline
colNum=$#

#set -x
while read line; do
  set -- $line
  for i in $(seq $colNum); do
    eval col$i="\"\$col$i \$$i\""
  done
done < file.txt

for i in $(seq $colNum); do
  eval echo \${col$i}
done

another version with set eval

Answer 3

I was looking for a solution to transpose any kind of matrix (nxn or mxn) with any kind of data (numbers or data) and got the following solution:

Row2Trans=number1
Col2Trans=number2

for ((i=1; $i <= Line2Trans; i++));do
    for ((j=1; $j <=Col2Trans ; j++));do
        awk -v var1="$i" -v var2="$j" 'BEGIN { FS = "," }  ; NR==var1 {print $((var2)) }' $ARCHIVO >> Column_$i
    done
done

paste -d',' `ls -mv Column_* | sed 's/,//g'` >> $ARCHIVO

Answer 4

If you have sc installed, you can do:

psc -r < inputfile | sc -W% - > outputfile

Answer 5

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'

Answer 6

An awk solution that store the whole array in memory

    awk '$0!~/^$/{    i++;
                  split($0,arr,FS);
                  for (j in arr) {
                      out[i,j]=arr[j];
                      if (maxr<j){ maxr=j}     # max number of output rows.
                  }
            }
    END {
        maxc=i                 # max number of output columns.
        for     (j=1; j<=maxr; j++) {
            for (i=1; i<=maxc; i++) {
                printf( "%s:", out[i,j])
            }
            printf( "%s\n","" )
        }
    }' infile

But we may "walk" the file as many times as output rows are needed:

#!/bin/bash
maxf="$(awk '{if (mf<NF); mf=NF}; END{print mf}' infile)"
rowcount=maxf
for (( i=1; i<=rowcount; i++ )); do
    awk -v i="$i" -F " " '{printf("%s\t ", $i)}' infile
    echo
done

Which (for a low count of output rows is faster than the previous code).