#194
Medium Shell Transpose file
Shell
30.7% acceptance
Feb 28, 2026
164
290
Given a text file file.txt, transpose its content.
You may assume that each row has the same number of columns, and each field is separated by the ' ' character.
Solution
Bash
#
# Given a text file file.txt, transpose its content.
# You may assume that each row has the same number of columns, and each field is separated by the ' ' character.
# Example:
# If file.txt has the following content:
# name age
# alice 21
# ryan 30
# Output the following:
# name alice ryan
# age 21 30
#
# Read from the file file.txt and print its transposed content to stdout.
awk '
{
for (i = 1; i <= NF; i++) {
if (NR == 1) col[i] = $i
else col[i] = col[i] " " $i
}
}
END {
for (i = 1; i <= NF; i++) print col[i]
}
' file.txt