[CentOS] cut command on centos

Fri Jan 12 16:52:13 UTC 2007
Jerry Geis <geisj at pagestation.com>

How do I make the delimiter for cut be a single character with hex value 1e?

I tried in a script file:

DELIMITER='\x1e'
DD=`echo $DATA | cut -f 1 --delimiter $DELIMITER`

and it tells me:
cut: the delimiter must be a single character

Jerry