Merging data from col 3 to col2 with awk or sed

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Dear Friends,

I have a file in which lists State and Phone numbers. Does anybody have a solution in which to take the data from col3 and place it on col2?

AK      2988421640      9077467107
AK      2998266711      2069239034
AK      2983804242      2069239034
AK      2960407849
AK      2953635689
AK      3001604175
AK      2931547348
AK      2938204541

Ideally the desired output would look like below. The position of the numbers matter as they are state specific and it would have at least 20 thousand rows.

AK      2988421640      
        9077467107
AK      2998266711      
        2069239034
        2069239034
AK      2983804242      
AK      2960407849
AK      2953635689
AK      3001604175
AK      2931547348
AK      2938204541

Thanks,

Your feedback greatly appreciated.

2

I'm guessing your files are tab-separated?

awk '{ print $1, $2; for(N=3; N<=NF; N++) print "", $N }' FS="\t" OFS="\t" datafile
3

If the input file has only 3 columns, than the script can be shortened to:

awk 'BEGIN{FS=OFS="\t"}{ print $1, $2 "\n\t" $3}' infile >outfile
4

Friends,

Thanks for the reply. Worked like a charm. Many Many Thanks...