I had to heavily restructure some csv spreadsheets recently each containing the same data from different experiment participants, and I didn’t want to do it manually for each one. GNU bash and sed did a lot of the work, but I didn’t have the patience to go into detailed scripting. Likely I discovered this collection of Unix shell utilities called Tabulator which made everything much easier. tbltranspose especially is such a time-saver.

To quote the project’s description:

A set of Unix shell command line tools for quick and convenient batch processing of tabular text files (a.k.a., tab-delimited, tsv, csv, or flat data file format) with a header line. Provides column reference by name, automatic delimiter and compression detection for per-line transformations, sql-like group-by operation and relational join.

The collection is free software released under the MIT license.

Let me know what you think about this via email or in the public chatroom.

Tags: Tabulator, CSV, command line tools