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Extract each column from a txt file and save into separate files, with the first line as file names

I have a dataframe that looks like this:

CHROM   POS p3_150  p3_166  p3_128 ......
scaffold1   834 4,1 5,7 6,0
scaffold1   950 5,0 11,0 5,0

What I wish to do is to extract every column starts from 3rd column and save them to separate files. The output files looks like:

p3_150.txt

p3_150
4,1
5,0

p3_166.txt

p3_166
5,7
11,0

p3_128.txt

p3_128
6,0
5,0

Is there a simple way to do the task without manually cut -f each column and save to files? Any suggestion will be very appreciated.

awk shell
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updated by Arup Ghosh Arup Ghosh • written by Cecelia • Cecelia

I have a dataframe

As in R? Or you are just referring to a data matrix that way.

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written by GenoMax GenoMax

3 answers

Since you mentioned cut, here is one way, if you know the number of columns to extract

seq 3 10 | while read -r LINENUM; do c_dat=$(cat file.txt | cut -f "$LINENUM"); c_name=$(cat file.txt | cut -f "$LINENUM" | head -1); echo "$c_dat" > "$c_name".txt; done
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written by venu venu

If an answer was helpful, you should upvote it; if the answer resolved your question, you should mark it as accepted. You can accept more than one if they work.
Upvote|Bookmark|Accept

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written by GenoMax GenoMax

not tested

awk -F '\t' '(NR==1) {split($0,header);next;} {for(i=3;i<=NF;i++) {f=sprintf("out.%s.txt",header[i]); print $i >> f;}}' input.tsv
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written by Pierre Lindenbaum Pierre Lindenbaum

You can try this Python script.

#!/usr/bin/python3
import sys,csv
fname = ''
fdata = ()
df = open(sys.argv[1],'r')
dfr = csv.reader(df, delimiter='\t')
dfcol = zip(*dfr)
for i in range(2,len(dfcol)):
    fname = str(dfcol[i][0])+'.txt'
    fdata = dfcol[i]
    print('Writing '+fname)
    fw = open(fname, 'w')
    fw.write('\n'.join(fdata))
    fw.close()
df.close()

test: 

python script.py input.tsv

The script will only work for tab-delimited files, to make it work with csv files change csv.reader delimiter.

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written by Arup Ghosh Arup Ghosh

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