Transpose from 2nd column till the last column

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi

I have 5 columns like this

a b c d e
f g h i j
k l m n o

From 2nd column till the 5th column of every record, I would like to transpose them as rows, so my output file contains only one row

a
b
c
d
e
f
g
h
i
j
k
l
m
n
o

Thanks

2

I tried this

echo "a b c d e
f g h i j
k l m n o" | tr ' ' '\n'

gave me the expected results :slight_smile:

1 Like
3

Thanks Pikk45, but my input file has more than 2000 columns.

4

So? tr doesn't care. It just deals char by char, so it can handle rows and columns of any size.

5

Is this taking too much to print??

try sed -e 's/\s/\n/g' file

6

That's ironic, since sed may have problems with huge lines, but tr never will!

1 Like
7

Thanks for the information :slight_smile:

8

Thanks to all of you. I used cat and then used the tr command from Pikk. It worked.

9

Useless cat :frowning: you could have used directly

tr ' ' '\n' < file
10

Another approach learned from Scrutinizer:

xargs -n1 < file