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

Here's a Haskell solution. When compiled with -O2, it runs slightly faster than ghostdog's awk and slightly slower than Stephan's thinly wrapped c python on my machine for repeated "Hello world" input lines. Unfortunately GHC's support for passing command line code is non-existent as far as I can tell, so you will have to write it to a file yourself. It will truncate the rows to the length of the shortest row.

transpose :: [[a]] -> [[a]]
transpose = foldr (zipWith (:)) (repeat [])

main :: IO ()
main = interact $ unlines . map unwords . transpose . map words . lines