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

Assuming all your rows have the same number of fields, this awk program solves the problem:

{for (f=1;f<=NF;f++) col[f] = col[f]":"$f} END {for (f=1;f<=NF;f++) print col[f]}

In words, as you loop over the rows, for every field f grow a ':'-separated string col[f] containing the elements of that field. After you are done with all the rows, print each one of those strings in a separate line. You can then substitute ':' for the separator you want (say, a space) by piping the output through tr ':' ' '.

Example:

$ echo "1 2 3\n4 5 6"
1 2 3
4 5 6

$ echo "1 2 3\n4 5 6" | awk '{for (f=1;f<=NF;f++) col[f] = col[f]":"$f} END {for (f=1;f<=NF;f++) print col[f]}' | tr ':' ' '
 1 4
 2 5
 3 6

Answer 2

There is a purpose built utility for this,

GNU datamash utility

apt install datamash  

datamash transpose < yourfile

Taken from this site, https://www.gnu.org/software/datamash/ and http://www.thelinuxrain.com/articles/transposing-rows-and-columns-3-methods

Answer 3

Have a look at GNU datamash which can be used like datamash transpose. A future version will also support cross tabulation (pivot tables)

Answer 4

Here's a Haskell solution. When compiled with -O2, it runs slightly faster than ghostdog's awk and slightly slower than Stephan's thinly wrapped c python on my machine for repeated "Hello world" input lines. Unfortunately GHC's support for passing command line code is non-existent as far as I can tell, so you will have to write it to a file yourself. It will truncate the rows to the length of the shortest row.

transpose :: [[a]] -> [[a]]
transpose = foldr (zipWith (:)) (repeat [])

main :: IO ()
main = interact $ unlines . map unwords . transpose . map words . lines

Answer 5

A oneliner using R...

  cat file | Rscript -e "d <- read.table(file('stdin'), sep=' ', row.names=1, header=T); write.table(t(d), file=stdout(), quote=F, col.names=NA) "