How to parse the listing (ls -ltr)

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi,

  I need to parse the listing \(ls -ltr\) in a given directory and get a particular value to see the success or failure. e.g

drwxr-xr-x 5 sensr vpnuser 512 Nov 7 07:46 disc_001811. Here i need to take the value 5 which is after drwxr-xr-x . how to so the same in shell scripting.

2 
ls -ltr | awk '{ print $2 }'