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    Are parameters here zero based and TO exclusive and FROM inclusive? Commented Mar 27, 2023 at 19:32
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    @Dims reading man head and man tail you can see that head -c 5 would give you the first five bytes of the source, and piping to tail -c +3 (or indeed head -c 3) would give you the first three bytes of that Commented Mar 27, 2023 at 19:40
  • @roaima You got it wrong with the tail. use -c +NUM to output starting with byte NUM. It will give you the last characters, starting with 3. Commented Mar 28, 2023 at 16:20
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    If $FROM can be large, it's probably more efficient to do tail -c +$FROM file.dat | head -c $LENGTH. That way tail can seek past the first $FROM bytes and start reading from there (and stop when it gets a SIGPIPE after head stops reading more data). Commented Mar 28, 2023 at 22:30
  • @IlmariKaronen, yes, that's a good point. At least GNU tail does seek (no surprise), Busybox didn't. Commented Mar 29, 2023 at 10:26