How do I extract a single chunk of bytes from within a file?

Question

On a Linux desktop (RHEL4) I want to extract a range of bytes (typically less than 1000) from within a large file (>1 Gig). I know the offset into the file and the size of t

Answer 1

head -c + tail -c

Not sure how it compare to dd in efficiency, but it is fun:

printf "123456789" | tail -c+2 | head -c3

picks 3 bytes, starting at the 2nd one:

234

See also: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1272995/895245