I find that I often need to manipulate text ntuples. PAW has a facility for this, but the output is ugly and hard to use, and requires some extra manipulation to make it usable in reports. Root is nicer but requires custom programming. I wrote an interface that takes your specifications and opens the file for you, and creates an TNtuple for you to fiddle with. It creates a .C file that contains the required commands. The file is a bash shell script: rootnt . The usage is
rootnt textfilename varname1:varname2:etc