rs(1) prints all output in a single line; how to duplicate the input array shape?

Question

Consider this usage of rs(1):

rs -n -z -c, <<CSV a,b,c dd,ee,ff CSV

The above snippet emits:

a b c dd ee ff

But I was expecting to see something like this:

a b c dd ee ff

The manual suggests that the output array shape should match the input array shape unless configured otherwise.

rs -h using the same input emits 2 3, which suggests that rs does correctly identify the input array shape.

What am I misunderstanding in the usage of rs? Is there a way to have it automatically format the output with the same shape as the input?

It's an ugly hack, but doing a -T (pure transpose) then piping the result through a second rs -T seems to work for me — steeldriver
– steeldriver, Commented Jan 31, 2023 at 22:09
Not answering your rs question but column -s, -t <<CSV ... does what you want. — glenn jackman
– glenn jackman, Commented Feb 1, 2023 at 3:00
@glennjackman I had problems with column when a leading cell is "blank", which is how I found rs in the first place! I made a follow-up question about it: unix.stackexchange.com/q/733969/73256 — shadowtalker
– shadowtalker, Commented Feb 1, 2023 at 16:27
Actually, rs has the same problem as column in that example! It's a little surprising that these basic tools behave so weirdly. I'm tempted to write my own AWK script and ignore all these. — shadowtalker
– shadowtalker, Commented Feb 1, 2023 at 16:27
rs is used to reshape data. It seems that you don't actually want to reshape the data, which in turn means rs might be the wrong tool for the job. — Kusalananda
– Kusalananda ♦, Commented Feb 13, 2023 at 12:10

glenn jackman · Accepted Answer · 2023-02-01 17:38:25Z

column does not behave as expected with leading empty fields. You might want this

awk 'BEGIN {FS = ","; OFS = "\t"} {$1 = $1} 1' <<DATA a,b,c ,x,y dd,ee,ff DATA

a b c x y dd ee ff

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