Making lots of wild assumptions about what operating system (and, therefore what type of shell is installed as sh , one might try something like the following:
#!/bin/sh
IAm=${0##*/}
if [ $# -lt 2 ]
then printf 'Usage: %s low high [low high]...\n' "$IAm" >&2
exit 1
fi
list=$1-$2
shift 2
while [ $# -ge 2 ]
do list=$list,$1-$2
shift 2
done
cut -c "$list" file_name >> file_new
Obviously, you should add a check to verify that an odd number of arguments were not given and you might want to add an output pathname as a parameter instead of always appending to the file named file_new , but this should get you started.