i'm trying to find a command that will print only the last character
stored in a shell variable.

i know how to delete the last character:
sed 's/.$//'

but when i try to use the a similar command with the reverse outcome:
sed 's/^[.$]//'

it does not work.
any suggestions are appreciated!

This regular expression uses a substring, between '\(' and '\)', to denote the last single character of the line in the search string. The replace string refers to the (first) substring with '\1' and so replaces the initial string with only the last character.
Note that means a line with only one or none characters because the '^' used in this way means 'beginning of line'. To reverse a charactermatch use which in this example doesn't do anything because it is searching for something thats not a character and not an 'end of line'.

Regards

thank you very much...

based on this answer, how would you go about printing the
FIRST character??