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Bash scripting question

I'm making a bash script that has to (amongst other things I figured out myself) delete the oldest file in a directory. I have an idea how to do it, but there's something I can't translate from common sense into a bash script.

I can list the files sorted by date with 'ls -c /whatever/path' and get the number of files with 'ls /whatever/path | wc -w'. Now all I have to do is set a variable with its value of whatever is the last word 'ls -c' outputs, or word number [number of files]. How exactly can I do that?

Thanks in advance, if I made enough sense to get an answer :)

Using tail:

Code:

ls -tc /whatever/path                          | \

  tail -n1                                    | \

  awk '{print "rm \"/whatever/path/" $1 "\""}' | \

  bash

The following code will set the value of f to the name of the oldest file in /whatever/path.

Code:

f=`ls -1c /whatever/path | tail -n1`

Note: the option for ls is a "one", not an "ell".

Thank you, that helped a lot.