Here's something to get you started. Hopefully you can find this helpful. 
#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;

my @required_cols = qw( colname1 colname3 colname4 );
my %record;

while (<DATA>) {
    my (@temp_data) = split( /\s+/ );
    push( @{ $record{$_} }, $temp_data[$_] )
      for (0 .. $#temp_data);
}

my (%final_data, $count);
for my $i ( keys %record ) {
    $count = 0;
    for my $j ( @{ $record{$i} } ) {
        push( @{ $final_data{$count} }, $j )
          if ( grep /\b$record{$i}->[0]\b/, @required_cols );
          $count++;
    }
}

print "@{ $final_data{$_} }\n" for ( sort keys %final_data );

__DATA__
colname1 colname2 colname3
val1 val2 val3
val11 val21 val31
val12 val22 val32

[download]

In reply to Re: Extracting selected column names and values from tab delimited text file by bichonfrise74
in thread Extracting selected column names and values from tab delimited text file by Ratna_Ranjan

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