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

Not very elegant, but this "single-line" command solves the problem quickly:

cols=4; for((i=1;i<=$cols;i++)); do \
            awk '{print $'$i'}' input | tr '\n' ' '; echo; \
        done

Here cols is the number of columns, where you can replace 4 by head -n 1 input | wc -w.