Hello,

Is there a way to transpose a file in shell scripting? For instance, from

a1 a2 a3 a4 a5 a6 a7 ....
b1 b2 b3 b4 b5 b6 b7 ....
c1 c2 c3 c4 c5 c6 c7 ....
d1 d2 d3 d4 d5 d6 d7 ...
...
...
...

to

a1 b1 c1 d1 ....
a2 b2 c2 d2 ....
a3 b3 c3 d3 ....
a4 b3 c3 d4 ....
...
...
...

Thanks in advance.

Yes there is, the question has been answered here several times. Try using the search functionality with keywords "row", "column" and "transpose".

Try...

Thanks, but the code didn't work. Any idea? why

no, not from your description - works fine here.

Wired, My file is a multi-column based tab delimited file with uneven rows. It needs to be transposed to row based txt file. This is code,
bash-2.03$ more file_transpose
###file transpose, colume to row
###from unix.com/ygor, 07/29/2005

awk '{
for (f = 1; f <= NF; f++)
a[NR, f] = $f
}
NF > nf { nf = NF }
END {
for (f = 1; f <= nf; f++)
for (r = 1; r <= NR; r++)
printf a[r, f] (r==NR ? RS : FS)
}' atcc_fidler_pvs_all_markers.txt > atcc_fidler_pvs_all_markers_out.txt

The error message is,
sorgerlab-x% bash
bash-2.03$ ./file_transpose
awk: syntax error near line 3
awk: illegal statement near line 3
awk: syntax error near line 9
awk: illegal statement near line 9

Thanks for the help

by the way, how to search the archives here.