How to convert rows to columns in unix

Question

I want my Unix file output, which has each value output on a new line, to be converted into grouped rows as shown below.

Say my output file in Unix looks like this:

Answer 1

This is a minimal awk solution:

awk 'ORS=NR%4?" ":"\n"' input.txt 

output

jobname userid starttime endtime
jobname2 userid starttime endtime

(If you want to align the fields, pipe to column -t)