I am trying to find a way, in bash, to turn a text with mutliple columns to appear as 1 column.

For example, I have a text file like this

Key1 Val1  Key4 Val4  Key7 Val7
Key2 Val2  Key5 Val5
Key3 Val3  Key6 Val6

and I want to turn this into

Key1 Val1
Key2 Val2
Key3 Val3
Key4 Val4
Key5 Val5
Key6 Val6
Key7 Val7

CodePudding user response：

You can do this with awk, iterate over each field and add a new line every second word.

awk '{for(i=1; i<=NF; i ) {printf "%s ",$i; if(i%2==0 && i!=NF) print ""} print ""}'

CodePudding user response：

You could try grep with sort

$ grep -o '\<\S* \S*\>' input_file | sort -n
Key1 Val1
Key2 Val2
Key3 Val3
Key4 Val4
Key5 Val5
Key6 Val6
Key7 Val7

CodePudding user response：

Using awk:

$ awk -F"  " '{                         # double space delimiter
    for(i=1;i<=NF;i  )                  # loop all fields
        a[i]=a[i] (a[i]==""?"":ORS) $i  # buffer to array a
}
END {                                   # in the end
    for(i=1;(i in a);i  )
        print a[i]                      # output the a array
}' file

Partial output:

Key1 Val1
Key2 Val2
Key3 Val3
Key4 Val4
...

Using sed:

$ sed 's/  /\n/g' file