Making a new header depending on entries from old header

Question

[ellieuk]

For many this will be very basic, but for me it's driving me nuts!

I have a tab-delimited header: sampleA sampleB sampleC

Depending on the number of samples I have, I want to make a new header as such:

For 3 samples: sampleA sampleB sampleC output001 output002 output003

For 4 samples: sampleA sampleB sampleC sampleD output001 output002 output003 output004 and so on...

I can duplicate the initial header to get the correct number of columns: paste header header

However, I want new column names.. and that's where I'm stuck....

Answer 1

[Ram]

Use awk and NF. You can use printf to pad 0s.

Example:

echo -e "sampleA\tsampleB\tsampleC" | awk -F"\t" -vOFS="\t" '{printf($0"\t"); for(i=1;i<NF;i++) printf("output%03d\t",i); printf("output%03d",i)}'