How to convert rows to columns in unix

unix

This is a minimal awk solution:

awk 'ORS=NR%4?" ":"\n"' input.txt

jobname userid starttime endtimejobname2 userid starttime endtime

(If you want to align the fields, pipe to column -t)

unix

This will paste each four consecutive lines as four tab-delimited fields:

cat source_file | paste - - - - > destination_file

unix

If you are looking for a shell script, you can do this as the number of lines to be printed in the output seems to have to fixed length:

while read line1; do  read line2  read line3  read line4  echo $line1 $line2 $line3 $line4 >>outputdone <file

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