Linux - multiple command execution using semicolon

Question

I have a scenario where I need to execute date command and ls -lrth|wc -l command at the same time.

I read somewhere on google that I can do it in the way shown below using the semicolon

ls -lrth | wc -l | ; date 

This works super fine!
But the problem is when I want to extract the output of this. This gives a two line output with the output of ls -lrth |wc -l in the first line and the second line has the date output like shown below

$ cat test.txt 
39
Mon Oct 26 16:11:20 IST 2015

But it seems like linux is treating these two lines as if its on the same line.
I want this to be formatted to something like this

39,Mon Oct 26 16:11:20 IST 2015

For doing this I am not able to separately access these two lines (not even with tail or head).

Thanks in advance.

EDIT
Why I think linux is treating this as a same line because when I do this as shown below,

 $ ls -lrth| wc -l;date | head -1
39
Mon Oct 26 16:24:07 IST 2015

The above reason is for my assumption of the one line thing.

Answer 1

Have you already tried using an echo?

echo $(ls | wc -l) , $(date)

(or something similar, I don't have a Linux emulator here)

Answer 2

If you want in your script ./script.sh

#!/bin/bash
a=$(ls -lrth | wc -l)
b=$(date)
out="$a,$b"
echo "$out"

EDIT

ls -lrth| wc -l;date | head -1

The semicolon simply separates two different commands ";"

Answer 3

Pipe to xargs echo -n (-n means no newline at end):

ls -lrth | wc -l | xargs echo -n ; echo -n ","; date

Testing:

$ ls -lrth | wc -l | xargs echo -n ; echo -n ","; date
11,Mon Oct 26 12:57:14 EET 2015