fastest way convert tab-delimited file to csv in linux

Question

I have a tab-delimited file that has over 200 million lines. What\'s the fastest way in linux to convert this to a csv file? This file does have multiple lines of header i

Answer 1

If all you need to do is translate all tab characters to comma characters, tr is probably the way to go.

The blank space here is a literal tab:

$ echo "hello   world" | tr "\\t" ","
hello,world

Of course, if you have embedded tabs inside string literals in the file, this will incorrectly translate those as well; but embedded literal tabs would be fairly uncommon.