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up vote 4 down vote favorite
2

Given a file like so

First, Last, Age
Cory, Klein, 27
John Jacob, Smith, 30

Is there a command line utility to transpose the contents so the output appears like so

First, Cory, John Jacob
Last, Klein, Smith
Age, 27, 30
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3  
The term you're looking for is transpose: see for example stackoverflow.com/questions/1729824/transpose-a-file-in-bash –  Bernhard Jan 8 '13 at 6:27

2 Answers 2

up vote 7 down vote accepted

CSV parsing is not easily done with POSIX tools only, unless you are using a simplified CSV variant with no quoting (so that commas can't appear in a field). Even then this task doesn't seem easy to do with awk or other text processing to tool. You can use Perl with Text::CSV, Python with csv, R with read.csv, Ruby with CSV, … (All of these are part of the standard library of the respective language except for Perl.)

For example, in Python:

import csv, sys
rows = list(csv.reader(sys.stdin))
writer = csv.writer(sys.stdout)
for col in xrange(0, len(rows[0])):
    writer.writerow([row[col] for row in rows])
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up vote 2 down vote

A quick & dirty solution :

c=1
file=file.txt
num_lines=$(wc -l < "$file")

for ((i=0; i<num_lines; i++)) {
    cut -d, -f$c "$file" | paste -sd ','
    ((c++))
}
share|improve this answer
    
what does /tmp/l represent? Additionally, would it not be simpler to loop through the columns rather than lines, something along the lines of for ((i=1; i<=$num_cols; ++i)); do paste -s -d, <(cut -f$i -d, file.txt); done –  1_CR Jan 8 '13 at 13:29
    
Thanks, that was a forgetting harcoded path. –  sputnick Jan 8 '13 at 20:03

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