Is this stupid? Drop Last Element of Erlang List

UPDATE: This is a very old article and the discussion here is interesting for historical reasons only. DO NOT use this code. Milton Inostroza helpfully and correctly pointed out that there is a lists:droplast/1 function in stdlib now. 

I wanted to drop the last element of a list. I didn't want a queue, I simply wanted to remove the last character of a string. Specifically I wanted to remove the \n from ref: refs/heads/master\n that comes back when reading the .git/HEAD file.

Code listing for trim.erl module:

-module(trim).

-export([string_strip_right/1, reverse_tl_reverse/1, bench/0]).

bench() -> [nbench(N) || N  {N, bench(["a" || _ 
    {{string_strip_right,
    lists:sum([
        element(1, timer:tc(trim, string_strip_right, [String]))
        || _  string:strip(String, right, $\n).

reverse_tl_reverse(String) ->
    lists:reverse(tl(lists:reverse(String))).

Benchmark transcript:

Erlang R13B04 (erts-5.7.5) [source] [64-bit] [smp:2:2] [rq:2] [async-threads:0] [hipe] [kernel-poll:false]

Eshell V5.7.5  (abort with ^G)
1> trim:bench().
[{1,{{string_strip_right,11261},{reverse_tl_reverse,1000}}},
  {1000,
    {{string_strip_right,55131},{reverse_tl_reverse,17915}}},
  {1000000,
    {{string_strip_right,79881856},                                  
     {reverse_tl_reverse,119920353}}}]
2>