Programming :: Receive Command Output And Store It To A Variable?

Suppose I want to account number of files beginning with abc , I can use "ls 'abc* | grep abc | wc -l", this will return me a number.
I want to store this number in a variable, say var1, so I tried
1. "ls 'abc* | grep abc | wc -l |read var1", but this didn't work as var1 has no value somehow.
2. var1='ls 'abc* | grep abc | wc -l', this just assign the entire string "ls 'abc* | grep abc | wc -l" to var1, which is not I wanted.

I don't want to store the value to a temporary file and then read the value from that file. I think there should be a direct way to get the value, but don't know how. I know in tcsh, one can just use set var1='ls 'abc* | grep abc | wc -l', but it also doesn't work in bash. Can anyone give any clue about this?