mjhjmtu

Have a look at GNU datamash which can be used like datamash transpose.
A future version will also support cross tabulation (pivot tables)

You could use awk to process the data then paste and column to format it.

Here I assume title1 is only an example in your post, and that data does not contain : except as separator between header + data.

n signifies how many columns to print (should match dashes in paste).

awk -F":" -v n=4 
'BEGIN x=1; c=0; 
 ++c <= n && x == 1 print $1; buf = buf $2 "n";
 if(c == n) x = 2; printf buf next;
 !/./c=0;next
 c <=n printf "%sn", $2' datafile | 
 paste - - - - | 
 column -t -s "$(printf "t")"

If you want to make it more flexible and easy to maintain you could write it as a script. Here is an example using bash wrapper for awk and piped to column. This way you could also do more data checking like e.g. making sure headers is correct throughout all rows etc.

Used typically as:

$ ./trans -f data -c 4
title one title two title three title four
A1 A2 A3 A4
B1 B2 B3 B4
C1 C2 C3 C4
D1 D2 D3 D4

If headers always is shorter then data you could also save header widths, then printf with %-*s and skip column all together.

#!/bin/bash

trans()

 awk -F":" -v ncol="$1" '
 BEGIN 
 level = 1 # Run-level.
 col = 1 # Current column.
 short = 0 # If requested to many columns.
 
 # Save headers and data for row one.
 level == 1 
 head[col] = $1
 data[col] = $2
 if (++col > ncol) # We have number of requested columns.
 level = 2
 else if ($0 == "") # If request for more columns then available.
 level = 2
 ncol = col - 2
 short = 1
 else 
 next
 
 
 # Print headers and row one.
 level == 2 
 for (i = 1; i <= ncol; ++i)
 printf("%st", head[i])
 print ""
 for (i = 1; i <= ncol; ++i)
 printf("%st", data[i])
 level = 3
 col = ncol + 1
 if (!short)
 next
 
 # Empty line, new row.
 ! /./ print ""; col = 1; next 
 # Next cell.
 col > ncol next
 
 printf "%s%s", $2, (col <= ncol) ? "t" : ""
 ++col
 
 END print ""
 ' "$2"


declare -i ncol=4 # Columns defaults to four.
file="" # Data file (or pipe).

while [[ -n "$1" ]]; do
 case "$1" in
 "-c") ncol="$2"; shift;;
 "-f") file="$2"; shift;;
 *) printf "Usage: %s [-c <columns>] [-f <file> | pipe]n" 
 "$(basename $0)" >&2;
 exit;;
 esac
 shift
done

trans "$ncol" "$file" | column -t -s "$(printf "t")"

Outside of rolling a custom solution to transpose rows with columns from a command line the only tool I've ever seen that can do this is a tool called ironically transpose.

Installation

Unfortunately it's not in any repo so you'll need to download and compile it. This is pretty straightforward since it has no additional libraries that it's dependent on. It can be accomplished like so:

$ gcc transpose.c -o transpose

Usage

It can handle straightforward text files with ease. For example:

$ cat simple.txt 
X column1 column2 column3
row1 0 1 2
row2 3 4 5
row3 6 7 8
row4 9 10 11

Can be transposed using this command:

$ transpose -t --fsep " " simple.txt 
X row1 row2 row3 row4
column1 0 3 6 9
column2 1 4 7 10
column3 2 5 8 11

This command is transpose to transpose (-t) and the field separator to use is a space (--fsep " ").

Your example

Since your sample data is in a slightly more complex format it needs to be dealt with in 2 phases. First we need to translate it into a format that transpose can deal with.

Running this command, will put the data in a more horizontally friendly format:

$ sed 's/:/ /; /^$/d' sample.txt 
 | sort | paste - - - - -
title1 A1 title1 B1 title1 C1 title1 D1 title2 A2
title2 B2 title2 C2 title2 D2 title3 A3 title3 B3
title3 C3 title3 D3 title4 A4 title4 B4 title4 C4
title4 D4 title5 A5 title5 B5 title5 C5 title5 D5

Now we just need to remove the secondary occurrences of the title1, title2, etc.:

$ sed 's/:/ /; /^$/d' sample.txt 
 | sort | paste - - - - - | sed 's/ttitle[0-9] / /g'
title1 A1 B1 C1 D1 A2
title2 B2 C2 D2 A3 B3
title3 C3 D3 A4 B4 C4
title4 D4 A5 B5 C5 D5

It's now in a format that transpose can deal with. The following command will do the entire transposition:

$ sed 's/:/ /; /^$/d' sample.txt 
 | sort | paste - - - - - | sed 's/ttitle[0-9] / /g' 
 | transpose -t --fsep " "
title1 title2 title3 title4
A1 B2 C3 D4
B1 C2 D3 A5
C1 D2 A4 B5
D1 A3 B4 C5
A2 B3 C4 D5

Here's a quick way to put the file into the format you want:

$ grep -Ev "^$|title5" sample.txt | sed 's/title[0-9]://g' | paste - - - -
A1 A2 A3 A4
B1 B2 B3 B4
C1 C2 C3 C4
D1 D2 D3 D4

If you want the column headers:

$ grep -Ev "^$|title5" sample.txt | sed 's/:.*//' | sort -u | tr 'n' 't'; 
 echo ""; 
 grep -Ev "^$|title5" a | sed 's/title[0-9]://g' | paste - - - -
title1 title2 title3 title4 
A1 A2 A3 A4
B1 B2 B3 B4
C1 C2 C3 C4
D1 D2 D3 D4

How the 2nd command works

grep -Ev "^$|title5" sample.txt | sed 's/:.*//' | sort -u | tr 'n' 't';

echo

grep -Ev "^$|title5" a | sed 's/title[0-9]://g' | paste - - - -

There's probably a more succinct way of formulating this but this seems to accomplish the general effect:

[jadavis84@localhost ~]$ sed 's/^title[2-9]://g' file.txt | tr 'n' 't' | sed 's/title1:/n/g' ; echo

A1 A2 A3 A4 A5 
B1 B2 B3 B4 B5 
C1 C2 C3 C4 C5 
D1 D2 D3 D4 D5 
[jadavis84@localhost ~]$ 

Multiple sed invocations doesn't feel right (and I'm pretty sure sed can do the new line translation as well) so it probably isn't the most straight forward way to do it. Also, this strips the would-be headers, but you can generate those manually once you have the rows/fields formatted properly.

A better answer would probably distill that effect down to just using sed or awk to do this so that you only have one thing going on at a time. But I'm tired so this is what I was able to put together.

GNU datamash utility

apt install datamash 

datamash transpose < yourfile

Taken from this site, https://www.gnu.org/software/datamash/ and http://www.thelinuxrain.com/articles/transposing-rows-and-columns-3-methods

paste is probably your best bet. You can extract the relevant bits with cut, grep and awk like this:

(awk 'NR==1' RS= infile | cut -d: -f1; cut -sd: -f2 infile)

If the 5th column should be eliminated, append awk 'NR%5' like this:

(awk 'NR==1' RS= infile | cut -d: -f1; cut -sd: -f2 infile) | awk 'NR%5'

Now columnate with paste:

(awk 'NR==1' RS= infile | cut -d: -f1; cut -sd: -f2 infile) | awk 'NR%5' | paste - - - -

Output:

title1 title2 title3 title4
A1 A2 A3 A4
B1 B2 B3 B4
C1 C2 C3 C4
D1 D2 D3 D4

For just the transpose part, I had a similar problem recently and used:

awk -v fmt='t%4s' ' for(i=1;i<=NF;i++) a[i]=a[i] sprintf(fmt, $i); END for (i in a) print a[i]; '

Adjust the fmt as needed. For each input line, it concatenates each fields onto an array element. Note that awk string concatenation is implicit: it happens when you write two things without any operator.

Sample I/O:

i mark accep igna utaal bta
-22 -10 -10 -20 -10 -10
-21 -10 -10 -20 -10 -10
-20 -10 -10 -20 -10 -10
-19 -10 0 -10 -10 -10
-18 0 0 -10 0 0
-12 0 0 -10 0 0
-11 0 0 -10 0 0
-10 0 0 -10 0 0

output:

 i -22 -21 -20 -19 -18 -12 -11 -10
 mark -10 -10 -10 -10 0 0 0 0
 accep -10 -10 -10 0 0 0 0 0
 igna -20 -20 -20 -10 -10 -10 -10 -10
 utaal -10 -10 -10 -10 0 0 0 0
 bta -10 -10 -10 -10 0 0 0 0

The simplest thing you can do is to use cut to cut the fields and then use tr if you're transposing rows to columns by replacing the newline character with a tab character: http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/coreutils.html#tr-invocation

cat file.txt | cut -d':' | tr 'n' 't'