From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <ebdfcf288f3ec91063fd3c0e59ae2983@hamnavoe.com>
To: 9fans@9fans.net
From: Richard Miller <9fans@hamnavoe.com>
Date: Sat, 14 Nov 2009 09:43:45 +0000
In-Reply-To: <426EC536-0207-47C8-93B9-C16623F895FC@mac.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Subject: Re: [9fans] rows to cols?
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 9bb3de4e-ead5-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025

> Wow.
> Excellent us of tools.

It's the sort of thing I used to give as an exercise to students.

> The smallest arbitrary-columns answer I could come up with was:
> awk '{if(m < NF)m=NF;for(i=1;i<=NF;i++)r[NR, i]=$i}END {for(i=1;i<=m;i+
> +){for(j=1;j<=NR;j++)printf "%s ", r[j,i];print ""}}' t

Explicit looping looks so strenuous.

To make the tr|pr method more general, you can count columns first with
	sed 1q | wc -b
or if you like
	awk '{print NF;exit}'

Counting rows is left as an exercise to the reader ...