If you want to stick with Bash then the commands split, join, cut, paste, join come in very handy. For me there is a threshold beyond which I move to AWK. Some

If you want to stick with Bash then the commands split, join, cut, paste, join come in very handy. For me there is a threshold beyond which I move to AWK. Some would prefer Perl over AWK, but I cannot hold all of Perl's syntax and keywords in my brain. Sometimes the needed processing is either a lot for AWK, or I have to be at my best behavior -- the equivalent of meeting my girlfriend's parents for the first time. In such cases I use Python. I usually do not use Python for one offs that I do not intend to maintain because with AWK you can usually relieve yourself of the ceremony of setting up a read and tokenize loop. Then again, some prefer making a sqlite database out of the file and use SQL. TLDR: split, join, cut, paste, join, AWK. Still TLDR: Coreutils (in particular textutils and fileutils) https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/coreutils.html https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/coreutils.html This is not to insinuate that OP does not already know this, commenting just in the hope that it is helpful to some.