An efficient way to transpose a file in Bash

Question

I have a huge tab-separated file formatted like this

X column1 column2 column3
row1 0 1 2
row2 3 4 5
row3 6 7 8
row4 9 10 11

I would like t

Answer 1

A hackish perl solution can be like this. It's nice because it doesn't load all the file in memory, prints intermediate temp files, and then uses the all-wonderful paste

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;

my $counter;
open INPUT, "<$ARGV[0]" or die ("Unable to open input file!");
while (my $line = ) {
    chomp $line;
    my @array = split ("\t",$line);
    open OUTPUT, ">temp$." or die ("unable to open output file!");
    print OUTPUT join ("\n",@array);
    close OUTPUT;
    $counter=$.;
}
close INPUT;

# paste files together
my $execute = "paste ";
foreach (1..$counter) {
    $execute.="temp$counter ";
}
$execute.="> $ARGV[1]";
system $execute;