Shell Programming and Scripting

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..,

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

Code:

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

Code:

BEGIN {
   filesN=split("a.txt b.txt c.txt", filesA, " ")
}
{
   for(i=1; i <= filesN; i++) {
      print $i > filesA[i]
      close(filesA[i])
   }
}

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