A new 'transpose' coreutil

[Ryan]

Hi everybody,

I looked through the rejected feature requests and did not find this.
I and others I know have often wished for an efficient 'transpose'
utility that can handle files of arbitrary size. I am aware of
solutions involving 'awk' and 'perl', but they are neither efficient
in time nor in space. There is also a 'coreutils-like' transpose
available on github, but it is also suboptimal in time and space,
often failing to perform well enough to be usable for moderately large
files) and is not consistent with other coreutils utilities in several
ways.

I would be interested in submitting a 'tranpose' tool, which I would
finish coding (I've already started for myself) and assign copyright
to the FSF. I am exerting significant effort to model all the
particulars of my code on existing coreutils code and various related
style recommendations. Features of my proposed tool include:

- works on rectangular matrices of arbitrary dimension (mxn)
- specifiable single-character separator (-t 'SEP')
- specifiable buffer (-S num_bytes_with_suffix) a la GNU sort
- correct and efficient function regardless of values S, m, or n
- specifiable temp directories (-T dir) a la GNU sort
- specifiable (de)compressor (--compress-program) a la GNU sort
- correct and efficient operation regardless of field length or length
uniformity
- correct support for input from or output to pipes
- standard handling of all other relevant flags

Please let me know if there is any interest. I would be very happy to
submit a draft for consideration if so. Finally, thanks to all the
people who have contributed the fantastic tools that already exist.

Kind regards,

Ryan Lichtenwalter