is there a way of specifying certain columns to be printed? e.g the 10th,18th and 20th column?

One way to do it - use an array slice: 

{
  local $" = "\t";
  print $OUT map "@{$_}[10,18,20]\n", sort { $a->[10] cmp $b->[10] } @
+out;
}

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In reply to Re^3: Split output by tabs by shmem
in thread Split output by tabs by perlnoobster

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