Efficient way to stripe incoming lines onto output columns?

Question

Consider a stream of one-word lines such as the stdout of

$ echo foo bar baz quux xyxxy thud | tr ' ' '\n'
foo
bar
baz
quux
xyxxy
thud

I say "one-word" to indicate there is no whitespace other than the newlines. I'd like to "columnize" the data by filling in a fixed number of fields (not single characters) per line, one row at a time. For small amounts of data, xargs does this nicely:

$ echo foo bar baz quux xyxxy thud | tr ' ' '\n' | xargs -n 2
foo bar
baz quux
xyxxy thud

However using xargs this way is slow. I have hundreds of gigabytes of text to process, so I would very much like my write throughput to hit the 50 MB/s or so that I know this hardware can do (the xargs above is orders of magnitude slower.) Is there something better available in the standard toolbox? I can write something if needed but I'd prefer using a text filter that's already there. The OS is an Ubuntu 9.10.

Answer 1

The best I can come up with is

$ echo foo bar baz quux xyxxy thud | tr ' ' '\n' \
  | perl -lne '$x.=" $_"; if(!($. % 2)){print $x; $x="";} END{print $x if $x}'
 foo bar
 baz quux
 xyxxy thud

or the arguably more elegant, though no shorter

$ echo foo bar baz quux xyxxy thud bang| tr ' ' '\n' \
  | perl -ne 'chomp; print "$_ "; print "\n" if (!($. % 3)); END {print "\n"}'
foo bar baz
quux xyxxy thud
bang

Efficiency?

$ time perl -e 'print "foo\n" for (1..10000)' | xargs -n 3 > /dev/null

real    0m1.330s
user    0m0.500s
sys     0m0.830s


$ time perl -e 'print "foo\n" for (1..10000)' \
  | perl -ne 'chomp; print "$_ "; print "\n" if (!($. % 3)); END {print "\n"}' \ 
  > /dev/null

real    0m0.060s
user    0m0.030s
sys     0m0.030s

Initially I tried 1000000 words but got fed up waiting for xargs though perl was 1.45s

(Timings done on andLinux under Vista-32 on an AMD-64 x2 5600+ 2.8GHz with 4GB RAM)