Does it have to be cat? I think you cant do this with cat but you can use sed (stream editor). Plus if u want u can do the space replacement with comma and so make a csv file that can be read by most worksheets. To do so simply use

This way you keep old files and create new ones, of course if u wana replace them use same file after stream redirector or whole command should look like this:

it only replaces space " " with commas "," it does not format or add empty values for missing columns in the rows. And sure make .csv extension. so sed 's/[:space:]+/,/g' /path/to/oldfile > /path/to/newfile.csv
or replace the "," with symbol of your choice.

It should be using cat and separate it by :.
Do you know how?

one more command is tr that u can use it would be

if you need to use cat, you can combine it with pipe "|" or sth. you can do this on bash shell
but if u dont need to save it to the newfile than simply use tr and let the standard input be your monitor not the file

I think cat wont do the job itself.

I think I shouldn't use cat!

A lot depends on the format of the input file. I can't find a way to format the output as desired, if the name, age, and gender are arranged in records horizontally.

However, if the data is vertical in the file, it can be done.

Example input filename test:
Command to output as name:age:gender
Sample output:

Bingo.

"cat" is short for "concatenate". The "cat" utility is designed to copy multiple files, appending to the output of the previous file.

It doesn't do columns.

column data/report generation is what awk was developed for.

Any chance to see a sample of the input file? What is the format of the report mentioned in the first post?