Convert rows to columns

If you have the rs (reshape) utility available, you can do the following:

rs -Tzc: < input.txt

This gives the output format exactly as specified in the question, even down to the dynamic column widths.

• -T Transposes the input data
• -z sizes the columns appropriately from the max in each column
• -c: uses colon as the input field separator

This works for arbitrarily sized tables, e.g.:

$ echo "Name:Alice:Bob:Carol
Age:12:34:56
Eyecolour:Brown:Black:Blue" | rs -Tzc: 
Name   Age  Eyecolour
Alice  12   Brown
Bob    34   Black
Carol  56   Blue
$ 

rs is available by default on OS X (and likely other BSD machines). It can be installed on Ubuntu (and debian family) with:

sudo apt-get install rs

EDIT: Extensible to any number of output rows, in a simple one-liner for loop:

for ((i=1;i<=2;i++)); do cut -d: -f "$i" input | paste -sd: ; done | column -t -s:

---

Original answer:

You can do this as a one-liner using bash process substitution:

paste -sd: <(cut -d: -f1 input) <(cut -d: -f2 input) | column -t -s:

The -s option to paste makes it handle each file one at a time. The : delimiter set in paste is "caught" by the -s option to column at the end, to pretty up the format by making the fields line up.

The cut commands in the two process substitutions pull out the first field and the second field, respectively.

Whether there are blank lines in the input or not doesn't matter, as column -t -s: will clean up the output regardless. (There were blank lines in the original input specified in the question, but they've since been removed. The above command works regardless of blank lines.)

Input - contents of file named "input" in above command:

Virtual_Machine:OL6U7

ID:0004fb00000600003da8ce6948c441bd

Status:Running

Memory:65536

Uptime:17103

Server:MyOVS1.vmworld.com

Pool:HA-POOL

HA:false

VCPU:16

Type:Xen PVM

OS:Oracle Linux 6

Output:

Virtual_Machine  ID                                Status   Memory  Uptime  Server              Pool     HA     VCPU  Type     OS
OL6U7            0004fb00000600003da8ce6948c441bd  Running  65536   17103   MyOVS1.vmworld.com  HA-POOL  false  16    Xen PVM  Oracle Linux 6

Using awk, store off the key and value and print them out in the end.

#!/usr/bin/awk -f
BEGIN {
  CNT=0
  FS=":"
}

{
  HDR[CNT]=$1;
  ENTRY[CNT]=$2;
  CNT++;
}

END {
  for (x = 0; x < CNT; x++)
    printf "%s\t",HDR[x]

  print""

  for (x = 0; x < CNT; x++)
    printf "%s\t",ENTRY[x]
  }

The just run awk -f ./script.awk ./input.txt