Hi everybody, I looked through the rejected feature requests and did not find this. I and others I know have often wished for an efficient 'transpose' utility that can handle files of arbitrary size. I am aware of solutions involving 'awk' and 'perl', but they are neither efficient in time nor in space. There is also a 'coreutils-like' transpose available on github, but it is also suboptimal in time and space, often failing to perform well enough to be usable for moderately large files) and is not consistent with other coreutils utilities in several ways.
I would be interested in submitting a 'tranpose' tool, which I would finish coding (I've already started for myself) and assign copyright to the FSF. I am exerting significant effort to model all the particulars of my code on existing coreutils code and various related style recommendations. Features of my proposed tool include: - works on rectangular matrices of arbitrary dimension (mxn) - specifiable single-character separator (-t 'SEP') - specifiable buffer (-S num_bytes_with_suffix) a la GNU sort - correct and efficient function regardless of values S, m, or n - specifiable temp directories (-T dir) a la GNU sort - specifiable (de)compressor (--compress-program) a la GNU sort - correct and efficient operation regardless of field length or length uniformity - correct support for input from or output to pipes - standard handling of all other relevant flags Please let me know if there is any interest. I would be very happy to submit a draft for consideration if so. Finally, thanks to all the people who have contributed the fantastic tools that already exist. Kind regards, Ryan Lichtenwalter
