I have a data that looks like this 1:SRX000566 Submitter: WoldLab Study: RNASeq expression profiling for ENCODE project(SRP000228) Sample: Human cell line GM12878(SRS000567) Instrument: Solexa 1G Genome Analyzer Total: 4 runs, 62.7M spots, 2.1G bases Run #1: SRR002055, 11373440 spots, 375323520 bases Run #2: SRR002063, 22995209 spots, 758841897 bases Run #3: SRR005091, 13934766 spots, 459847278 bases Run #4: SRR005096, 14370900 spots, 474239700 bases 2:SRX000565 Submitter: WoldLab Study: RNASeq expression profiling for ENCODE project(SRP000228) Sample: Human cell line GM12878(SRS000567) Instrument: Solexa 1G Genome Analyzer Total: 3 runs, 51.2M spots, 1.7G bases Run #1: SRR002052, 12607931 spots, 416061723 bases Run #2: SRR002054, 12880281 spots, 425049273 bases Run #3: SRR002060, 25740337 spots, 849431121 bases 3:SRX012407 Submitter: GEO Study: GSE17153: Illumina sequencing of small RNAs from C. elegans embryos(SRP001363) Sample: Caenorhabditis elegans(SRS006961) Instrument: Illumina Genome Analyzer II Total: 1 run, 3M spots, 106.8M bases Run #1: SRR029428, 2965597 spots, 106761492 bases Is there a compact way to convert them into tabular format (tab separated). Hence 1 entry/row per chunk. In these case 3 rows. I tried this but doesn't seem to work. perl -laF/\n/ -000ne"print join chr(9),@F" myfile.txt