Split delimited file into smaller files by column

I'm familiar with the split command in linux. If I have a file that's 100 lines long,

split -l 5 myfile.txt

...will split myfile.txt into 20 files, each having 5 lines, and will write them to file.

My question is, I want to do this by column. Given a file with 100 columns, tab delimited, is there a similar command to split this file into 20 smaller files, each having 5 columns and all the rows?

I'm aware of how to use cut, but I'm hoping there's a simple UNIX command I've never heard of that will accomplish this without wrapping cut with perl or something.

Thanks in advance.

Solution

#!/bin/bash

(($# == 2)) || { echo -e "\nUsage: $0 <file to split> <# columns in each split>\n\n"; exit; }

infile="$1"

inc=$2
ncol=$(awk 'NR==1{print NF}' "$infile")

((inc < ncol)) || { echo -e "\nSplit size >= number of columns\n\n"; exit; }

for((i=0, start=1, end=$inc; i < ncol/inc + 1; i++, start+=inc, end+=inc)); do
  cut -f$start-$end "$infile" > "${infile}.$i"
done