What is the purpose of the 'cut' command in this example?

The cut command in the provided example is used to extract specific portions of text from input data. In the context of the script, it is utilized to parse command-line arguments by splitting them based on the = delimiter.

Here's a breakdown of its usage:

index=$(echo $arg | cut -f1 -d=)
val=$(echo $arg | cut -f2 -d=)

• cut -f1 -d= extracts the first field (before the =) and assigns it to the variable index.
• cut -f2 -d= extracts the second field (after the =) and assigns it to the variable val.

This allows the script to handle key-value pairs passed as arguments effectively.