Cutting Columns and Moving in to a file

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Guys,

Can any one tell me how can we cut the columns and move each column in to a separate file using awk?

I have a tab delimited file as shown below,
1213 wattt werree
2345 skhasdjh aasas

I want to output this in to three files named a.txt,b.txt and c.txt
say a.txt contains
1213
2345

and b.txt contains
watt
skhasdjh

and so on..,

Thanks..,

2

I'm no Awk guru but wouldn't something like the following work:

awk -F\t '{ print $1 }' ~/Desktop/datafile.txt > ~/Desktop/a.txt

awk -F\t '{ print $2 }' ~/Desktop/datafile.txt > ~/Desktop/b.txt

awk -F\t '{ print $3 }' ~/Desktop/datafile.txt > ~/Desktop/c.txt
3 
BEGIN {
   filesN=split("a.txt b.txt c.txt", filesA, " ")
}
{
   for(i=1; i <= filesN; i++) {
      print $i > filesA
      close(filesA)
   }
}
4

1) how to print columns : see 7.5.1
2) directing output to file: see 10.5