How can you make this script general?

[Anonymous Monk]

Hello!
I have this script that calculates the sum of each column in a tab-separated file. My problem is that I would like to make it work even if I don't know how many columns I have, i.e. somehow create the arrays dynamically based on number of columns perhaps...Can you help me?

my @split_array9=();
my @split_array9_col1=();
my @split_array9_col2=();
my @split_array9_col3=();
open (INFILE9, '<', 'ex1.dat');
while( my $line9 = <INFILE9>)
{
  my @split_line9 = split(/\t/, $line9);

  my $element_col_1 = $split_line9[0];
  my $element_col_2 = $split_line9[1];
  my $element_col_3 = $split_line9[2];

  push (@split_array9_col1, $element_col_1);
  push (@split_array9_col2, $element_col_2);
  push (@split_array9_col3, $element_col_3);
}  
close INFILE9;

#calculate the sums for each column based on each of the arrays
my $sum_col1=0;
my $sum_col2=0;
my $sum_col3=0;

for (my $w=0; $w<=$#split_array9_col1; $w++)
{
  $sum_col1 = $sum_col1 + $split_array9_col1[$w];
}

for (my $y=0; $y<=$#split_array9_col2; $y++)
{
  $sum_col2 = $sum_col2 + $split_array9_col2[$y];
}

for (my $z=0; $z<=$#split_array9_col3; $z++)
{
  $sum_col3 = $sum_col3 + $split_array9_col3[$z];
}

print "The sum for column 1 is: $sum_col1, the sum for column 2 is: $s
+um_col2 and the sum for column 3 is: $sum_col3.\n";