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

I used fgm's solution (thanks fgm!), but needed to eliminate the tab characters at the end of each row, so modified the script thus:

#!/bin/bash 
declare -a array=( )                      # we build a 1-D-array

read -a line < "$1"                       # read the headline

COLS=${#line[@]}                          # save number of columns

index=0
while read -a line; do
    for (( COUNTER=0; COUNTER<${#line[@]}; COUNTER++ )); do
        array[$index]=${line[$COUNTER]}
        ((index++))
    done
done < "$1"

for (( ROW = 0; ROW < COLS; ROW++ )); do
  for (( COUNTER = ROW; COUNTER < ${#array[@]}; COUNTER += COLS )); do
    printf "%s" ${array[$COUNTER]}
    if [ $COUNTER -lt $(( ${#array[@]} - $COLS )) ]
    then
        printf "\t"
    fi
  done
  printf "\n" 
done