I'd like to extract the 2nd field and transpose it to become a row
cat > temp1
1 73
2 74
3 75
My approach :
cut -f2 temp1 | tr '\n' '\t' > temp2
The result :
temp2
73 74 75
Understandably, there is a tab separator at the right end of the line but missing a new line character. Is there an simple one-liner to fix this?
Use paste instead of tr:
$ cut -f2 temp1 | paste -s
73 74 75
verifying the invisible whitespace
$ cut -f2 temp1 | paste -s | od -c
0000000 7 3 \t 7 4 \t 7 5 \n
0000011
cat file | cut -d' ' -f2 | xargs -n3
73 74 75
and to verify the invisible whitespace per @glenn jackman
cat file | cut -d' ' -f4 | xargs -n3 | od -c
0000000 7 3 7 4 7 5 \n
0000011
The simplest way to print/emit/give a new line is to use echo.
It seems quite simple to add a new line to the file created:
cut -f2 temp1 | tr '\n' '\t' > temp2 echo >> temp2
Which could be done in one line as:
{ cut -f2 temp1 | tr '\n' '\t' ; echo ; } > temp2
That is: if the trailing tab is not a problem. If it is, you need to either remove it or avoid it being generated, any of this will do it:
awk 'NR>1{printf( "%s\t",a)}{a=$2}END{print a}' temp1 >temp2
sed -n 's/[0-9]*[[:blank:]]*//;1{h;d};H;${g;y/\n/\t/;p}' temp1 >temp2
sed 's/[0-9]*[[:blank:]]*//' temp1 | paste -sd '\t' >temp2