[bash] How to store command results in a shell variable?

I want to find out the number of directories and files in home directory and store that in a shell variable. I am using the following set of commands.

command="ls -l | grep -c \"rahul.*patle\""
eval $command

I want to store the result in a variable. How can I do this?

The syntax to store the command output into a variable is var=$(command).

So you can directly do:

result=$(ls -l | grep -c "rahul.*patle")

And the variable $result will contain the number of matches.