two bash scripting questions

[Mark Knecht]

Hi,
   I've built a little bash script that does some music stuff for me
in Gnome. I've set a mime type in Gnome so that I can click on certain
files, a terminal opens, the script runs, I answer some questions and
the script makes the music server do some things. It works well, as
far as it goes, but there are a couple of things I couldn't figure out
on Sunday.

1) If I run a generic command that talks to a music server in a
terminal I get a response of OK. I'd like to capture this OK, vs. the
other possibilities or WARN or ERR, and take action based on that
response. How can I do this in a script?

2) In the case of the command that adds channels to my server I get a
response that has the channel number buried in the OK, such as OK[3]
telling me the ADD CHANNEL command completed and the new channel is
number 3. How can I capture this number for use in the script? The
normal command sequence here might look like

echo "ADD CHANNEL" | nc localhost 8888

and I receive 

OK[3] back in the terminal. I tried some things like

OUTPUT=`echo "ADD CHANNEL" | nc localhost 8888`

and

OUTPUT=$(echo "ADD CHANNEL" | nc localhost 8888)

but they didn't work.

   The script is small. It's attached in case there are better ways to
do this stuff that people want to share.

Thanks much,
Mark