UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi Everyone,

I was wondering if someone could help me to transform my data into a format I need.
Here is an example of what my data looks like

and this is what I would need it to look like:

Basically, I need to take every column and put it under each other.
I've tried doing it with awk by creating separate files for each column and then combine them by using cat, but it takes a lot of time and a lot of temporary files.

Many thanks for your help and time in advance!

Is that really what the data looks like, or are the row/column labels stuff added for illustration?

The data really has labels (just not A,B, C etc)

Many thanks for your time!

... and no white space in the column or row labels?

In the custom of this site, please post your solution first.

... there are no specs in the names of the columns or rows (the label looks like this: aaaa_bbbb)

My solution was to make files for each column with awk:

Code:

awk '{print $1, $2}' file1 > file2
awk '{print $1, $3}' file1 > file3
awk '{print $1, $4}' file1> file4
etc

then combine them with cat:

Code:

cat file2 file3 file4 > file 5

The problem is that I don't have the column's label in the first column and since there are a lot of columns it takes me forever even if I make a loop, not to mention the number of temporary files and cat commands. So, I was wondering if anyone had a better solution.

Many thanks for your time!

try this

Code:

awk 'NR==1{;a=$0} NR>1{for(i=1;i<NF;i++) {v=$(i+1);r=$1;b=$0;$0=a;c=$i;$0=b;print r c":"v };  }' file

It works wonderfully! Just what I needed!

Thank you so so so much!!!!!!