How to get the last character of a string in a shell?

Question

I have written the following lines to get the last character of a string:

str=$1
i=$((${#str}-1))
echo ${str:$i:1}

It works for abcd/

Answer 1

another solution using awk script:

last 1 char:

echo $str | awk '{print substr($0,length,1)}'

last 5 chars:

echo $str | awk '{print substr($0,length-5,5)}'