Parsing command output in bash to variables - bash

Question

I have a number of bash scripts, each doing its own thing merrily. Do note that while I program in other languages, I only use Bash to automate things, and am not very good at it.
I'm now trying to combine a number of them to create "meta" scripts, if you will, which use other scripts as steps. The problem is that I need to parse the output of each step to be able to pass a part of it as params to the next step.
An example:
stepA.sh
[...does stuff here...]
echo "Task complete successfuly"
echo "Files available at: $d1/$1"
echo "Logs available at: $d2/$1"
both the above are paths, such as /var/www/thisisatest and /var/log/thisisatest (note that files always start with /var/www and logs always start with /var/log ). I'm only interested in the files path.
steB.sh
[...does stuff here...]
echo "Creation of $d1 complete."
echo "Access with username $usr and password $pass"
all variables here are simple strings, that may contain special characters (no spaces)
What I'm trying to build is a script that runs stepA.sh, then stepB.sh and uses the output of each to do its own stuff. What I'm currently doing (both above scripts are symlinked to /usr/local/bin without the .sh part and made executable):
#!/bin/bash
stepA $1 | while read -r line; do
# Create the container, and grab the file location
# then pass it to then next pipe
if [[ "$line" == *:* ]]
then
POS=`expr index "$line" "/"`
PTH="/${line:$POS}"
if [[ "$PTH" == *www* ]]
then
#OK, have what I need here, now what?
echo $PTH;
fi
fi
done
# Somehow get $PTH here
stepB $1 | while read -r line; do
...
done
#somehow have the required strings here
I'm stuck in passing the PTH to the next step. I understand this is because piping runs it in a subshell, however all examples I've seen refer to to files and not commands, and I could not make this to work. I tried piping the echo to a "next step" such as
stepA | while ...
echo $PTH
done | while ...
#Got my var here, but cannot run stuff
done
How can I run stepA and have the PTH variable available for later?
Is there a "better way" to extract the path I need from the output than nested ifs ?
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Since you're using bash explicitly (in the shebang line), you can use its process substitution feature instead of a pipe:
while read -r line; do
if [[ "$line" == *:* ]]
.....
fi
done < <(stepA $1)
Alternately, you could capture the command's output to a string variable, and then parse that:
output="$(stepA $1)"
tmp="${output#*$'\nFiles available at: '}" # output with everything before the filepath trimmed
filepath="${tmp%%$'\n'*}" # trim the first newline and everything after it from $tmp
tmp="${output#*$'\nLogs available at: '}"
logpath="${tmp%%$'\n'*}"