Transpose a file in bash

Question

Hi all,

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 to transpose it in an efficient way using only using commands (I could write a ten or so lines Perl script to do that, but it should be slower to execute than the native bash functions). So the output should look like

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

I thought of a solution like this

cols=`head -n 1 input | wc -w`
for (( i=1; i <= $cols; i++))
do cut -f $i input | tr $'\n' $'\t' | sed -e "s/\t$/\n/g" >> output
done

But it's slow and doesn't seem the most efficient solution. I've seen a solution for vi in this post, but it's still over-slow. Any thoughts/suggestions/brilliant ideas? :-)

Answer 1

apl :) is the ONLY way to go here

Answer 2

gawk

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

Answer 3

A hackish perl solution can be like this. It's nice because it doesn't load all the file in memory, prints intermediate temp files, and then uses the all-wonderful paste

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;

my $counter;
open INPUT, "<$ARGV[0]" or die ("Unable to open input file!");
while (my $line = <INPUT>) {
    chomp $line;
    my @array = split ("\t",$line);
    open OUTPUT, ">temp$." or die ("unable to open output file!");
    print OUTPUT join ("\n",@array);
    close OUTPUT;
    $counter=$.;
}
close INPUT;

# paste files together
my $execute = "paste ";
foreach (1..$counter) {
    $execute.="temp$counter ";
}
$execute.="> $ARGV[1]";
system $execute;

Answer 4

The only improvement I can see to your own example is using awk which will reduce the number of processes that are run and the amount of data that is piped between them:

/bin/rm output 2> /dev/null

cols=`head -n 1 input | wc -w` 
for (( i=1; i <= $cols; i++))
do
  awk '{printf ("%s%s", tab, $'$i'); tab="\t"} END {print ""}' input
done >> output

Answer 5

If you have sc installed, you can do:

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

Answer 6

A Python solution:

python -c "import sys; print('\n'.join(' '.join(c) for c in zip(*(l.split() for l in sys.stdin.readlines() if l.strip()))))" < input > output

The above is based on the following:

import sys

for c in zip(*(l.split() for l in sys.stdin.readlines() if l.strip())):
    print(' '.join(c))

This code does assume that every line has the same number of columns (no padding is performed).

Answer 7

Here is a moderately solid Perl script to do the job. There are many structural analogies with @ghostdog74's awk solution.

#!/bin/perl -w
#
# SO 1729824

use strict;

my(%data);          # main storage
my($maxcol) = 0;
my($rownum) = 0;
while (<>)
{
    my(@row) = split /\s+/;
    my($colnum) = 0;
    foreach my $val (@row)
    {
        $data{$rownum}{$colnum++} = $val;
    }
    $rownum++;
    $maxcol = $colnum if $colnum > $maxcol;
}

my $maxrow = $rownum;
for (my $col = 0; $col < $maxcol; $col++)
{
    for (my $row = 0; $row < $maxrow; $row++)
    {
        printf "%s%s", ($row == 0) ? "" : "\t",
                defined $data{$row}{$col} ? $data{$row}{$col} : "";
    }
    print "\n";
}

With the sample data size, the performance difference between perl and awk was negligible (1 millisecond out of 7 total). With a larger data set (100x100 matrix, entries 6-8 characters each), perl slightly outperformed awk - 0.026s vs 0.042s. Neither is likely to be a problem.

---

Representative timings for Perl 5.10.1 (32-bit) vs awk (version 20040207 when given '-V') vs gawk 3.1.7 (32-bit) on MacOS X 10.5.8 on a file containing 10,000 lines with 5 columns per line:

Osiris JL: time gawk -f tr.awk xxx  > /dev/null

real    0m0.367s
user    0m0.279s
sys 0m0.085s
Osiris JL: time perl -f transpose.pl xxx > /dev/null

real    0m0.138s
user    0m0.128s
sys 0m0.008s
Osiris JL: time awk -f tr.awk xxx  > /dev/null

real    0m1.891s
user    0m0.924s
sys 0m0.961s
Osiris-2 JL:

Note that gawk is vastly faster than awk on this machine, but still slower than perl. Clearly, your mileage will vary.

Answer 8

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 9

Hi

I used fgm's solution (thanks fgm!), but needed to eliminate the tab characters at the end of each row, so modified the script thus:

#!/bin/bash 
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" ${array[$COUNTER]}
    if [ $COUNTER -lt $(( ${#array[@]} - $COLS )) ]
    then
        printf "\t"
    fi
  done
  printf "\n" 
done