Of course, there are the ways eluded to in your original question, but just for fun (since I'm learning regex's these days):

use strict;

my $string = "This is a test.\n";

$string =~ s/^(.{1})(.*)/$2/;
[download]

Update
I've got to start reading the existing replies before I make mine! My regex has about 3x more characters than needed, especially after looking at Roger's and some of the others. So many ways, so little time.