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

The only improvement I can see to your own example is using awk which will reduce the number of processes that are run and the amount of data that is piped between them:

/bin/rm output 2> /dev/null

cols=`head -n 1 input | wc -w` 
for (( i=1; i <= $cols; i++))
do
  awk '{printf ("%s%s", tab, $'$i'); tab="\t"} END {print ""}' input
done >> output