UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

ok, heres my problem.

i have saved the last line from a ls -l command into a variable. What i want to do is be able to cut the second character into that (i.e. the r if its there of the - if its not there) and save that value into another variable.

here is the current code i have to save the ls -l into a variable:

Code:

var1=$(ls -1 $1 | tail -1)

and here is what code i have come up with to get the second character from that line:

Code:

cut -c 2 $var1

please help me, been stuck on this problem for about an hour now.

(also, i cant use SED or AWK so bash soloutions would be awesome)

Would you like to cut the second character from the filename?

Code:

 
echo $var1 | cut -c2