Using bash to read elements on a diagonal on a matrix and redirecting it to another file

Question

So, currently i have created a code to do this as shown below. This code works and does what it is supposed to do after I echo the variables:

a=`awk \'NR==2 {pri         


        

Answer 1

An alternative using sed and coreutils, assuming space separated input is in infile:

n=$(wc -l infile | cut -d' ' -f1)
for i in $(seq 1 $n); do
  sed -n "${i} {p; q}" infile | cut -d' ' -f$i
done