I can't quite make head or tails of your posts, but I'm bored anyhow, so here's my take:

#! /usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

die "Not enough arguments" if $#ARGV < 2;

my ($start, $end, $file) = @ARGV;

open FILE, $file    or die "Couldn't open file";
while (<FILE>) {
    my @chars = split //;
    print @chars[$start..$end], "\n" if @chars >= $end;
}
[download]

It's quite a derail, but if someone could point me towards a node with examples or some sort of documentation of autodie, I'd be grateful (my Super Search-fu isn't strong).

+ + for effort & brevity

Note, however, that this code prints six-character strings, whereas OP's example output (in the narrative) looks for only five.

As for autodie and your search fu, Super Search doesn't require a whole lot of fu;
here's the output where the only input was "autodie": ?node_id=3989;BIT=autodie