Shell Programming and Scripting

I have a file which has users having different values against them in second column.

I want to set a range and get the count of users in that range.

Suppose :-

a 4
b 19
c 27
d 87
e 123

And I define the range like 1-20 , 20 -50 and so on..... Please assume the range as x-y, y-z, z-w etc...

I want to count of users which lies in the specific range ?

Code:

#/usr/bin/env ksh
awk '
     BEGIN {
        if( start > stop$2 )
            exit( 1 )
    }

    $2 >= start && $2 <= stop { c++ }

    END{ printf( "%d users in the range %d-%d\n", c, start, stop) }
' start="${1%%-*}" stop="${1##*-}" $2

Simple shell script. Assumes the range (start-stop) is supplied on the command line as the first parameter. Optionally the second parameter is the file to read (reads from stdin if not supplied). Small bit of error checking short circuits (prevents reading all of a large file) if the range is invalid.