can you define "split a file"? My example above would take any line with "fooN" in it and add it to the file 'splitN.txt' ... Since OP didn't specify, i assumed by "split" he meant "send certain lines to certain files" .. From your sample data it seems that by "split" you mean "create separate files for each 'column' of data". A quick & dirty (and again, WARNING, very inefficient) way for that would be:

perl -lne "chomp; @x = split /abc/, $_; do { open FILE, '>>', 'col'.$_
+.'.txt'; print FILE $x[$_]; close FILE } for 0 .. $#x" blah.txt
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