Shell Programming and Scripting

Thanks. The problem is somehow just a opposite of the original one. Basically, we need to transpose a row based file to a column based file, please see below. Since the Excel has a limitation of 256 columns, it is almost useless to those who want to transpose a big file.

file format(tab delimited):

chip1 a1 b1 c1 d1 ......
chip2 a2 b2 c2 d2 .............
chip3 a3 b3 c3 d3 .........
....

after transpose(tab delimited),
chip1 chip2 chip3 chip4 ...
a1 b1 c1 d1 ...
a2 b2 c2 d2 ...
a3 b3 c3 d3 ...
....

sorry, it's wrong.
after transpose,

chip1 chip2 chip3 ...
a1 a2 a3 ...
b1 b2 b3 ...
c1 c2 c3 ...
....

how's that different from the original?
the output I get is:

Code:

chip1   chip2   chip3
a1      a2      a3
b1      b2      b3
c1      c2      c3
d1      d2      d3

original was column to row, but now is row to column.

have you tried running the script?
isn't the above output what you wanted?

yes, original input was,
chip1 chip2 chip3 ...
a1 a2 a3 ...
b1 b2 b3 ...
c1 c2 c3 ...
...

output was,
chip1 a1 b1 c1 ...........
chip2 a2 b2 c2 ......
chip3 a3 b3 c3 ..............
...

ok, if you give it this input - what happens?

Code:

chip1 a1 b1 c1 d1
chip2 a2 b2 c2 d2
chip3 a3 b3 c3 d3